Travels in an Undiscovered Country

[S7] Ancestry.com, 1910 United States Federal Census, database on-line, Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2006, (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed by Carl Fields, 2004-2011); citing Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910, population schedules (NARA microfilm publication T624), Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, National Archives, Washington, D.C. Interim or placeholder ("lumped-source"-type) source citations for US 1790-1930 census population schedules have been adapted from source description information on Ancestry.com. Most of this census information was indeed taken from the Ancestry.com census page-images. However, in a few cases, the census information was (1) taken directly from microfilm - either at the Family History Library (Salt Lake City, UT), the Newberry Library (Chicago, IL), or at the Aiken Family History Center (using microfilm reels "rented" from the Family History Library), or (2) from on-line digital images from other providers, such as FamilySearch. For simplicity, the "accessed tags" all refer to ancertry.com. The long-term plan is to eventually replace all of these interim source citations with detailed citations based on one of the other of the two books by Elizabeth Shown Mills, Evidence or Evidence Explained.
[S9] Ancestry.com, 1930 United States Federal Census database on-line, Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2002, (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed by Carl Fields, 2004-2011); citing Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930, population schedules (NARA microfilm publication T626), Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29. National Archives, Washington, D.C. Interim or placeholder ("lumped-source"-type) source citations for US 1790-1930 census population schedules have been adapted from source description information on Ancestry.com. Most of this census information was indeed taken from the Ancestry.com census page-images. However, in a few cases, the census information was (1) taken directly from microfilm - either at the Family History Library (Salt Lake City, UT), the Newberry Library (Chicago, IL), or at the Aiken Family History Center (using microfilm reels "rented" from the Family History Library), or (2) from on-line digital images from other providers, such as FamilySearch. For simplicity, the "accessed tags" all refer to ancertry.com. The long-term plan is to eventually replace all of these interim source citations with detailed citations based on one of the other of the two books by Elizabeth Shown Mills, Evidence or Evidence Explained.
[S28] "New Jersey state census records, 1915," microfilm of manuscript, 63 microfilm reels; citiing original records: New Jersey, Department of State, 1915 Census of State of New Jersey (Archives Section, State Library, Trenton, New Jersey, c1976); Family History Library, Perth Amboy records are on FHL reel 1465546. Some or all New Jersey state census records are apparently in the process of being placed on line as of June 2013; these records were reviewed around 2006 when they were available only on microfilm.
[S55] Carl Clarence Fields, birth certificate, local file no. 34841 (file date not legible), Miichigan Department of Community Heath, State of Michigan Vital Records Office, Lansing, Michigan.
[S56] Personal recollection (memory) of Carl Fields (Aiken SC). .
[S99] Donna Jean (Smith) Fields, "Data Report on Spouse (15 June 1971)", Form AEC-354 (one page) filled out after her marriage; copy privately held by Carl Fields; Aiken, South Carolina. It is possible that the United States Department of Energy (DOE) retains copies of this form, and similar forms filled out by Donna Jean (Smith) Fields, Carl C. Fields, and Linda Ruth (Johnson) Wright. DOE is the successor agency to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) as of 2012.
[S111] Bonnie Heenan, Gassville, Arkansas, to Carl Fields, e-mail, "Re: Virgil Eugene Fields Death Certificate -- 1936" (transmitting transcribed information from Mary Jane Fields Southard's bible), 16 February 2008; privately held by Carl Fields, Aiken, South Carolina, Computer Files (e-mails, Genealogy, or "Gene," section of Local Folders).
[S183] "Arkansas County Marriages, 1837-1957," database with images, FamilySearch (http://familysearch.org
[S184] Inferred by Carl Fields (Aiken SC).
[S198] New Jersey (Middlesex County) Department of Health and Senior Services, death certificate, State File Number 02666, (14 Jan 1949),Jeannette Golosoff Fields; Bureau of Vital Statistics and Registration, Trenton.
[S204] Moses Segal Family entry; Chemnitz Passenger List, 6 Mar 1906; in Passenger and Crew Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1897-1957 (National Archives Microfilm Publication T715, 8892 rolls), (Washington DC: Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, National Archives and Records Administration), NARA T715 microfilm roll 670 (FHL microfilm roll 1399354)

The following was adapted from an e-mail sent by Carl Fields to several family members and other (possibly) interested persons:

Eight members of the extended Segal family arrived on 3 March 1906 aboard the S. S. Chemnitz, which had sailed from Bremen, February 17, 1906 to port of New York. These names were on list of second class passengers. An employee of the shipping company probably initially made up this list during the boarding/embarkation process. At least two sets of later annotations were made to the list. One group of later annotations was probably made by US officials during the entry/immigration process in New York (the relationships in Column 2, the correction of "Perth" in Column 11, and the combined dollar value in Column 14 are in this group). The other group includes the notations in Column 8 (such as the one opposite Nathan Golosoff's name); these annotations appear to have been made much later (perhaps in the 1940s).

Carl Fields first saw this passenger list around 2005 via microfilm in the collection of the Family History Library (FHL). It appears to be FHL microfilm number 1399354. The passenger list is also available via the Ellis Island web site (www.ellisisland.org) both as an image and as searchable database entries for each individual (but only a portion of the data on the passenger list has been entered into the database). The database entries are based on transcriptions (which, in some cases, differ from how Carl Fields reads the content of the handwritten entries on the passenger list).

The passenger list is also available as an image and as a (transcribed) searchable database from Ancestry.com (www.ancestry.com). It appears the searchable ancestry.com database contains fewer items from the passenger list than the corresponding Ellis Island database.

Ancestry.com cites the passenger list information as follows (with some minor editing by Carl Fields): Ancestry.com. New York Passenger Lists, 1820-1957 database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2006. Original data: (1) Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1820-1897; (National Archives Microfilm Publication M237, 675 rolls); Records of the U.S. Customs Service, Record Group 36; National Archives, Washington, D.C. and (2) Passenger and Crew Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1897-1957; (National Archives Microfilm Publication T715, 8892 rolls); Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service; National Archives, Washington, D.C.

Ancestry.com provides two sources because they have combined two National Archives record groups/publications (M237 and T715) to produce to create one database. The original National Archives source data for the 1906 entry, was, of course, T715. The Ancestry.com source citation for a search for Nissan Golossoff is: Year: 1906; Microfilm serial: T715; Microfilm roll: T715_670; Line: 6.

The following paragraphs list the following items for each of these eight people (paraphrasing from the column headings on the passenger list form): name, age, gender, occupation, can read?, can write?, Nationality (citizenship), "Race or People," last residence, final destination, have ticket to final destination? (from port of entry to final destination, apparently), who paid for passage, possess $50?, previous been to US?, joining relative or friend in US (if so, identify). The entries on the passenger list are difficult to read. In addition, almost every name on this list is different from the name commonly used by the person in later life in the US. The primary listing given here for personal names is a July 2009 reading by Carl Fields of the Ancestry.com version image of the passenger list. Following this primary personal name listing (in parentheses) is (1) the reading of the passenger list in the transcription in the Ellis Island database and (2) the name (eventually) more commonly used by the person (for formal purposes) during their life in the US. The "last residence" entry is also difficult to read. The primary listing is (again) the July 2009 reading by Carl Fields. It is followed (in parentheses) by the reading of the passenger list in the Ellis Island database.

Moses Ziegelneisky (Moses Ziegelnicky, Moses Segal), 55, male, merchant, yes, yes, Russia, Hebrew, Berdjansk (Bezdjansk), Perth Amboy, no ticket to final destination, passage paid by self, $713.00 (total for entire family), never in US previously, relative: brother-in-law, Joseph Slobodien.

Reisa Ziegelneisky (Reisa Ziegelnicky, Reisel Segal), 55, female, none, yes, yes, Russia, Hebrew, Berdjansk (Bezdjansk), Perth Amboy, no ticket to final destination, passage paid by husband, $713.00 (total for entire family), never in US previously, relative: brother, Joseph Slobodien.

Jechusial Ziegelneisky (Jechusial Ziegelnicky, Constant Segal), 18, male, student, yes, yes, Russia, Hebrew, Berdjansk (Bezdjansk), Perth Amboy, no ticket to final destination, passage paid by father, $713.00 (total for entire family), never in US previously, relative: uncle, Joseph Slobodien.

Jeskial Ziegelneisky (Jesekial Ziegelnicky, Harry Segal), 26, male, merchant, yes, yes, Russia, Hebrew, Berdjansk (Bezdjansk), Perth Amboy, no ticket to final destination, passage paid by self, $713.00 (total for entire family), never in US previously, relative: uncle, Joseph Slobodien.

Hene Ziegelneisky (Hene Ziegelnicky, Hannah Segal), 20, female, none, yes, yes, Russia, Hebrew, Berdjansk, Perth Amboy, no ticket to final destination, passage paid by husband, $713.00 (total for entire family), never in US previously, relative: uncle, Joseph Slobodien.

Nissan Golossoff (Nissan Golossoff, Nathan Golosoff), 27, male, merchant, yes, yes, Russia, Hebrew, Adrandowsk (Alexandrowsk), Perth Amboy. no ticket to final destination, passage paid by self, $713.00 (total for entire family), never in US previously, relative: uncle, Joseph Slobodien.

Necham Golossoff (Necham Golossoff, Anna Golosoff), 23, female, none, yes, yes, Russia, Hebrew, Adrandowsk (Alexandrowsk), Perth Amboy, no ticket to final destination, passage paid by husband, $713.00 (total for entire family), never in US previously, relative: uncle, Joseph Slobodien.

Sina Golossoff (Sina Golossoff, Jeanette Golosoff), 3 months, female, N/A, yes, yes, Russia, Hebrew, Adrandowsk (Alexandrowsk), Perth Amboy, no ticket to final destination, passage paid by father, $713.00 (total for entire family), never in US previously, relative: uncle, Joseph Slobodien.

The form contains several other columns, but they are blank for each of these persons. The questions in those other columns are (paraphrasing): ever in poorhouse?, polygamist?, anarchist?, indentured labor question, condition of health?, deformed or crippled? (looks like the last two may have been intended to be filled out at inspection station).

Joseph Slobodien's address (Column 16) is also difficult to read. It appears to be: 127 Smith Street, Perth Amboy, NJ. The relationships in Column 16 appear intended to be given as what Joseph is to each individual. The relationships to Joseph Slobodien are a bit confused (if Carl's reading of the relationships on the passenger list and his understanding of the actual relationships is correct). Joseph Slobodien was married to the sister of Moses Segal. So the relationship apparently given on the passenger list for what Joseph was to Moses (brother-in-law) is correct. However, the passenger list appears to indicate that Joseph is a brother to Reisel. Actually, he would also be a brother-in-law to her. It is unclear if this is an error made by the person filling out the form, or if this was fudged intentionally by the family to suggest a closer relationship to family members already in the US. For the others, Joseph Slobodien was listed as an uncle, which is generally accurate (he was an uncle by marriage - and a granduncle to Jeanette). The relationship notation in Column 2 seems to suggest Hannah is a child of Moses -- and she was a daughter (-in-law). However, other information on the form (her marital status and who paid for her passage) would indicate there was no attempt to exaggerate this relationship.

Not having a ticket to a final destination was probably not an issue for someone arriving at the New York City docks for a final destination to Perth Amboy. The trip from the docks to Perth Amboy basically involved going to Staten Island on the ferry, taking a train across Staten Island, and then going across Arthur Kill to Perth Amboy via a second ferry. The total fare per person in 1906 was probably something on the order of 20-30 cents (perhaps less).

Information on the Ellis Island web site (as of July 2009) suggests that since this family apparently traveled as second class passengers (as opposed to third class, or steerage, passengers), they may never have actually set foot on Ellis Island (and may not have been processed there). Apparently, the normal procedure for first and second class passengers was for them to be processed at the arrival dock and be admitted there, unless there were signs of illness. Ill "upper class" immigrant passengers might be sent to Ellis Island, but there are no notations on the passenger list indicating this happened to the Segals or Golosoffs (the family that appears on the list after the Golosoffs may have had this experience based on notes on the passenger list). The fact that their immigration records are on the Ellis Island web site does not necessarily indicate they really "passed through" Ellis Island. In this case, "Ellis Island" is apparently a convenient name for the repository for US immigration records for the port of New York from the period when Ellis Island was in operation.

General information about the "dockside" and Ellis Island entry inspection and immigration process is contained in (www.ellisisland.org/genealogy/ellis_island_history.asp). This information includes the following:

"… The great steamship companies like White Star, Red Star, Cunard and Hamburg-America played a significant role in the history of Ellis Island and immigration in general. First and second class passengers who arrived in New York Harbor were not required to undergo the inspection process at Ellis Island. Instead, these passengers underwent a cursory inspection aboard ship; the theory being that if a person could afford to purchase a first or second class ticket, they were less likely to become a public charge in America due to medical or legal reasons. The Federal government felt that these more affluent passengers would not end up in institutions, hospitals or become a burden to the state. However, first and second class passengers were sent to Ellis Island for further inspection if they were sick or had legal problems.

"This scenario was far different for "steerage" or third class passengers. These immigrants traveled in crowded and often unsanitary conditions near the bottom of steamships with few amenities, often spending up to two weeks seasick in their bunks during rough Atlantic Ocean crossings. Upon arrival in New York City, ships would dock at the Hudson or East River piers. First and second class passengers would disembark, pass through Customs at the piers and were free to enter the United States. The steerage and third class passengers were transported from the pier by ferry or barge to Ellis Island where everyone would undergo a medical and legal inspection.

"If the immigrant's papers were in order and they were in reasonably good health, the Ellis Island inspection process would last approximately three to five hours. The inspections took place in the Registry Room (or Great Hall), where doctors would briefly scan every immigrant for obvious physical ailments. Doctors at Ellis Island soon became very adept at conducting these "six second physicals." By 1916, it was said that a doctor could identify numerous medical conditions (ranging from anemia to goiters to varicose veins) just by glancing at an immigrant. The ship's manifest log (that had been filled out back at the port of embarkation) contained the immigrant's name and his/her answers to twenty-nine questions. This document was used by the legal inspectors at Ellis Island to cross-examine the immigrant during the legal (or primary) inspection. The two agencies responsible for processing immigrants at Ellis Island were the United States Public Health Service and the Bureau of Immigration (later known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service - INS). ….

"….Despite the island's reputation as an "Island of Tears", the vast majority of immigrants were treated courteously and respectfully, and were free to begin their new lives in America after only a few short hours on Ellis Island. Only two percent of the arriving immigrants were excluded from entry. The two main reasons why an immigrant would be excluded were if a doctor diagnosed that the immigrant had a contagious disease that would endanger the public health or if a legal inspector thought the immigrant was likely to become a public charge or an illegal contract laborer."

A second description of certain aspects of this process (at web site: blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2009/04/family-stories-and-other-fairy-tales.html) also states that "upper class" passengers were generally admitted before steerage passengers (although the process it describes differs from the Ellis Island web site description in a few details). This second description (not explicitly quoted here) is primarily focused on how incoming passengers were interviewed by immigration officials.

The information quoted above from the Ellis Island web site mentions "29 questions". The 3 March 1906 passenger list for the Chemnitz had 22 columns. However, some columns contained follow-up questions, such as (paraphrasing): have you been in the US before, and, if so, where and when. Because of this structure, counting questions is problematic, but it could be 29.

Information about the ship, the Chemnitz (or SS Chemnitz) and the shipping line Norddeutcher Lloyd or North German Lloyd is available at several locations on the internet (such as: (www.theshipslist.com/ships/descriptions/ShipsC.html). The Chemnitz that existed in 1906 was the second on to bear than name, and is sometime referred to as Chemnitz (2) or Chemnitz II. The following information is from www.theshipslist.com (as of July 2009), but similar information was available in 2009 from several other web sites.

"The "Chemnitz" was built by J.C.Tecklenborg at Geestemunde for Norddeutscher Lloyd [North German Lloyd] in 1901. She was a 7542 gross ton vessel, length 428.2ft x beam 54.3ft, one funnel, two masts, twin screw and a speed of 13 knots. There was accommodation for 129-2nd class and 1,935-3rd class passengers. Launched on 27.11.1901. she left Bremen on her maiden voyage to Baltimore on 21.3.1902. She made her first run from Bremen to New York and Galveston on 30.11.1902, and from Bremen to Philadelphia and Baltimore on 1.12.1910. On 11.6.1914 she left Bremen on her last voyage to New York, Philadelphia and Galveston and was then laid up in Bremen in August 1914 for the duration of the war. In 1919, she was surrendered to Britain and was managed by J.Chambers & Co, Liverpool From 1922-23 she ran for Ellerman's Wilson Line, Hull and was scrapped in Rotterdam in 1923. [North Atlantic Seaway by N.R.P.Bonsor, vol.2] [Norddeutscher Lloyd, Bremen, vol.2 by Edwin Drechsel contains photo of the ship ISBN 1-895590-08-6]"

Apparently the North German Lloyd line had to surrender all of their ships for war reparations at the end of World War I (that is why the Chemnitz was "surrendered to Britain" in 1919 in the material quoted immediately above). The company went back into business (starting with leased ships) in the early 1920s, but then, again, lost all of their ships in World War II (or possibly at the end of the war). They restarted in business (again) in the 1940s and, after at least one merger, are still in business in 2009 as Hapag-Lloyd AG.
[S218] County Clerk of Middlesex County, Middlesex County New Jersey Land Records (Electronic Copy at Middlesex County Land Records web site (https://(mcrecords.co.middlesex.nj.us/records/index.jsp)).

Bk 1588/081 item is warranty deed (deed conversion) for sale of property from Ralph Fields (for himself and as guardian of "infants" Carl Fields and Sarah Fields of Lots 11, 12, and 13 in Block 406-G of Woodbridge Estates in Woodbridge Township, NJ. Sold to Louis Sarno for $525. Document states that property had previously been conveyed to Janette Golosoff by Joseph Gumenik and Sadie Gumenik on 2/19/1942 (Deed Book 1212, pg 311). Marriage of Ralph Fields and Jeannette Golosoff stated as on 5 Nov 1943 and she died intestate on 13 Jan 1949. Document mentions certain court actions permitting sale of infants property.

Bk 1594/328 item is for property at 272 Market Street in Perth Amboy, NJ. Previous sale is in book 1151, page 139 (but date and name of seller is not listed). Other information is much the same as for the other property.

Edward J Patten is listed as a clerk on both documents.
[S228] Robert Craig, Newark (Arkansas) Journal Web Site (www.bootheel.net/). This site appears to have been taken down some time before 2005 (although Carl Fields has captured much of the information from it).
[S246] Polk's Perth Amboy (Middlesex County, New Jersey) City Directory 1940 (Volume XXXIV) (354-360 Fourth Ave, New York NY: R. L. Polk & Co., Publishers, 1940); Perth Amboy Public Library, microfilm, 196 Jefferson Street, Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Hereinafter cited as Polk's Perth Amboy City Directory 1940.
[S247] Polk's Perth Amboy (Middlesex County, New Jersey) City Directory 1942 (545 Sixth Ave, Pittsburgh PA: R. L. Polk & Co., Publishers,, 1942); Perth Amboy Public Library, microfilm, 196 Jefferson Street, Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Hereinafter cited as Polk's Perth Amboy City Directory 1942.
[S250] Polk's Perth Amboy (New Jersey) City Directory 1929 (1-3 Pease St., New Brunswick NJ; 524-528 Broadway, New York City: R. L. Polk & Co., New Jersey, Publishers, 1929); FHL microfilm 2,309,470-2,309,475. Hereinafter cited as Polk's Perth Amboy City Directory 1929.
[S251] Polk's Perth Amboy (New Jersey) City Directory 1930 (1-2 Pease St., New Brunswick NJ; 524-528 Broadway, New York City: R. L. Polk & Co., New Jersey, Publishers, 1-2 Pease St., New Brunswick NJ; 524-528 Broadway, New York City, 1930); FHL microfilm 2,309,470--2,309,475. Hereinafter cited as Polk's Perth Amboy City Directory 1930.
[S252] Polk's Perth Amboy (New Jersey) City Directory 1931 (Volume XXXII) (1-2 Pease St., New Brunswick NJ; 524-528 Broadway, New York City: R. L. Polk & Co., New Jersey, Publishers, 1931); FHL microfilm 2,309,470--2,309,475. Hereinafter cited as Polk's Perth Amboy City Directory 1931.
[S253] Polk's Perth Amboy (New Jersey) City Directory 1935 (Volume XXXIII) (243 Tremont Ave., Orange NJ; 354-360 Fourth Ave., New York NY: R. L. Polk & Co., Publishers, 1935); FHL microfilm 2,309,470--2,309,475. Hereinafter cited as Polk's Perth Amboy City Directory 1935.
[S254] Arkansas Department of Health, birth certificate (delayed -- issued 12 Dec 1940) , Ralph Fields, date of birth: 17 February 1904; Department of Health, Little Rock.
[S271] Richmond's Perth Amboy Directory 1927 (524-528 Broadway, New York City; 1-3 Peace St., New Brunswick NJ, Telephone: Canal 7100: R. L. Polk & Co., New Jersey, Publishers,, 1927); FHL microfilm 2,309,470--2,309,475. Hereinafter cited as Richmond's Perth Amboy Directory 1927.
[S279] Ralph Fields, Sears Easy Payment Order -- July 18, 1950 (n.pub.).
[S280] State of New Jersey, pharmacy license, to Jennette Golosoff Fields, License No. 7502, issued 9 October 1929; original, family copy, Miscellaneous Fields/Golosoff Family Papers; privately held by Carl Fields, Aiken South Carolina, document held as of June 2012. This is a large format document on stiff cardboard, something that would be used (probably framed) in a pharmacy where she worked (the copy is not in a frame in 2012). Document is (unfortunately) in damaged condition (water damage, due to poor decision by Carl to store it in a garage in the late 1980s). This license was originally issued in 1929, but the "original" that is currently held (as of 2012) was apparently re-issued after her marriage in 1943, since it carries her married name. Later Note (29 Dec 2016). The information given in this citation was copied from the certificates some time ago, probably in the late 1990s or early 2000s. However, they were not photographed at that time (Carl apprently planned to try to clean them, hopefully removing mildew) in order to obtain a "good" photo). Unfortunately, they seem to have vanished in the intervening years (perhaps stolen or inadventently thrown out by cleaning staff -- or perhaps just misplanced within the house?). Until or unless they are located at some future time, the transcription given here is the best available information as to the wording on these certificates.
[S282] "Social Security Death Index," database, Ancestry.com, (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed various dates), based on "Social Security Master Death Index," US Social Security Administration.
[S288] Bill Freeze, (Editor), The Newark Journal -- Clippings in Bill Freeze Family Scrapbook (Newark Arkansas: self published, c 1992). At the time of the Newark, Arkansas centennial celebration (around 1992), Bill Freeze printed (by "xerox" copy) many copies of his family scrapbook, which largely consisted of items clipped from the town's newspaper by Bill's mother. The newspaper, The Newark Journal, was published from around 1900 to 1958. Various members of Craig Family were editors of the newspaper -- first Oscar (or O. W.), then Roy Sr., then Roy Jr. Carl Fields obtained a copy of this document (the Freeze Family scrapbook) in September 2004 and went through it to locate references to his family. The exact date and month of publication is not available for many of the clippings.
[S289] Susan Segal (Senior Editor), The Segal Family Tree, 1848-1984 (Cambridge, MA: BAFTO International [Privately Publlished], 1984). Hereinafter cited as Segal Family Tree, 1848-1984.
[S373] 1880 United States Census, Missouri, population schedule, Clinton Township (ED 30), Douglas County, p 3, Household 25, William C Fields; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed by Carl Fields 2009) , based on NARA Microfilm Publication T9.
[S414] Jeanette Golosoff, U. S. Citizenship and Imigration Records (USCIS) Genealogy Program (Historical Records), Certificate of Naturalization and related records, obtained by Freedom of Information Act/Privacy Act request (submitted August 2008), Certificate Number 3404716, (December 11, 1930); U. S. Department of Homeland Security, P. O. Box 648010, Lee's Summit, Missouri.

This file/package contains copies of several items (some or all copied apparently printed from microfilm): (1) an index card containing soundex code for surname (G421), certificate number (3404716), name GOLOSOFF, Miss Jeanette, residing at 267 Smith Street, Perth Amboy, N. J., age 25, date of order of admission (also date certificate issued): December 11, 1930, Common Pleas Court, New Brunswick NJ, Petition 14424; (2) a certificate of naturalization (No. 3404716), dated 11 December 1930, which mentions he is age 25, 4 ft, 4 in tall, 88 pounds, fair complexion, auburn hair, brown eyes, single, and Hebrew, former nationality Russian, address 267 Smith Street, Perth Amboy, NJ;(3) a petition for citizenship (No. 14424) made in Middlesex County Common Pleas Court, 27 August 1930, giving same address as certificate, listing birth on August 8, 1905 in Berdansk Russia, arrived in US on March 2, 1906 aboard SS Chemnitz, witnesses are Miss Helen Bode and a second person whose name is illegible (partly because portions of that second name were obscured when some information -- addresses probably -- about the witnesses was redacted), the surname of the second person might be Riley; (4) a handwritten declaration of intent to become a citizen of the US apparently dated 12 March 1926, much of the information on this certificate is similar to the petition except the immigration date is (incorrectly) given as February 1906 (but is qualified by stating it was on or about that date) or is illegible (in particular her address at that time is illegible), birth date is again 8 August 1905; (5) an application for a new declaration of intent, stating the original has been lost, mutilated, or destroyed, apparently dated April/May 1930 (most of the information on this form is illegible -- it was, a first, not clear if the declaration of intent described above was recovered from files, or if it was actually completed in 1930 and backdated, however a note at the bottom of Item 7, below, appears to clarify that it was backdated); (6) an apparent carbon copy of information typed on some type of preprinted form, dated May 21, 1930, gives height and hair color, address, and name of court (Common Pleas); (7) a formal, typed version of the Declaration of Intention, formally dated 12 March 1926, but actually prepared in May 1930, lists information similar to what is described above, with exceptions that occupation is listed (Pharmacist), place of birth is listed as Bendauch Russia, and 1926 address of 202 Market Street, Perth Amboy is listed.
[S423] 1920 United States Census, Arkansas, population schedule, Newark Town, Big Bottom Township (ED 26) Independence County, p 8A (Image 52), Household 173, George M Fields; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed by Carl Fields 7 January 2006) , based on NARA Microfilm Publication T625.
[S468] Roy A. Bowers and David L. Cowen, The Rutgers University College of Pharmacy: A Centennial History (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1991). Hereinafter cited as New Jersey College of Pharmacy History. This book is a general history of the college, which was founded as what can be viewed as a private"trade school" in Newark, New Jersey. Since c1928 it has been a college within Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey. In 1925 the school was located at 509 High Street in Newark and pharmacy was a 2-year program.

An interesting fact mentioned in this book is that annual student tuition was $260 in 1928, more than the $200 tuition charged undergraduates in the academic program at Rutgers (the tuition in 1923-25 is not known).

Another is that the college had a research program in the 1920s. One line of research, sponsored by the Kraft-Phenix Cheese Corporation, led to the development of Velveeta cheese around 1930. The motivation for this research was to find a use for whey, a byproduct of the manufacture of "normal" cheese, which had apparently previously been discarded.
[S576] "Michigan Deaths, 1971-1996," database Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : 20 March 2010), Ralph Fields, died 18 July 1980, Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan; based on "Michigan Death Index," Michigan Department of Vital and Health Records, Lansing, MI.
[S651] Ralph Fields Cemetery Marker, Blue Springs Cemetery, Newark, Independence County, Arkansas; Carl Fields, read July 2000 (and on other dates).
[S666] Carl Fields, "Personal Recollections about Ralph Fields" :

This note contains a series of recollections about Ralph Fields (1904-1980). This note is written by Carl Fields (1944- ), son of Ralph Fields. I am writing this informally and in the first person, which is more comfortable for me for this material. I am starting to write this on December 27, 2009 (about 29.5 years after my father’s death). Obviously, my memories have faded (and possibly become distorted) during the long time interval since his death. I anticipate I will be writing (and editing) this material, on-and-off, over the next several months.

Dad told me on several occasions that he had no middle name. However, one family member (Bonnie Heenan, if I recall correctly, who is not one of dad’s contemporaries) has his name listed with a middle initial, Ralph M Fields. My memory is that she told me she did not have any memory what the “M” may have stood for, or where she obtained that name for him. I believe it was Bonnie who suggested that perhaps he did have a middle name, but did not like it and managed to suppress it over the years. The next two brothers up from (older than) him (William Orville and Virgil Aaron) and the next brother younger (Robert Lacy) did have middle names.

My father was born in Pleasant Plains, Arkansas. Someplace, I have photo of him and me (made about 1950) standing in front of the house where he was born (or, perhaps more precisely, the house where he believed he was born). The family moved to Newark, Arkansas within a year or two after he was born, and he grew up in Newark. Newark is perhaps 25 miles northeast of Pleasant Plains – and on the opposite side of the White River (both communities are in Independence County). His maternal uncle, Henry Wood Johnson, continued to live in Pleasant Plains, so Dad (and his brothers) probably visited there occasionally, which is likely how he knew the specific location (the house) where he was born (Dad’s brother, my Uncle Virgil, is listed as living in Pleasant Plains in the 1930 census).

He was one of five brothers who grew to adulthood. They were sometimes known as “the Fields boys” – a term that was sometimes applied to me when I was a boy growing up in Newark, between the ages of about 5 to 15. Apparently, I resembled my dad and his brothers to some extent, so some elderly people in Newark – who, I presume, remembered what my dad and his brothers looked like when they were ages 5-15 -- could identify my family connection from my appearance. I’m not sure if the people realized I had to be a descendant, or if perhaps some of them may have believed I was one of the original five (now that I’m older, I realize it’s possible to lose track of time -- and the ages of others -- in this way).

There had been at least one other brother, Alvin, who died in 1909, after living only about a month. (Two of my father’s paternal uncles – John Hartwell Fields and Lindsey Waters Fields – also each had at least six sons.) In last few years, since I started collecting family history information, I have learned (from 1900 and 1910 census information) that my dad had another sibling (gender unknown) who was born and who died before the 1900 census. I know nothing about that additional sibling – and it’s possible Dad never knew of his or her existence. Thus, he could have had an additional brother.

My dad had at least two sisters, Dilla (or possibly Della), 1894-1911, and Ruby Alice (a half sister), 1912-1993 (and sibling who died before 1900 could have been female). The two known sisters never met – the older one died before the younger one was born.

I know very little about my dad’s childhood. The house that he remembered growing up in (on Long Street in Newark) burned around 1938. I presume the family had photo albums, report cards, etc. However, all of that stuff (if a collection of it existed) was probably destroyed with the house. When I was a youngster in Newark, a second (replacement) house existed on the lot (along with the original barn – and possibly also the original well). However, I’m pretty sure the re-built house was smaller than the original one (the rebuilt house was one story, while I believe I heard the original house was two stories). Current-day maps (as this is written in 2010) seem to call the portion of the street when this house was located North Long Street, but I do not recall the use of directions in connection with street names when I lived in Newark in the 1950s, I also remember hearing that my dad was in the house when it caught fire in 1938 – and may have had a narrow escape. (When I was a youngster, a family named Prince lived in that replacement house, then still owned by my grandfather’s estate. Kenneth Prince, of that family, was in my class at school. Kenneth’s father was a brother – or possibly a half-brother – to my stepsisters’ father. I have a vague memory of being at Kenneth’s house at some time in the 1950s, before Newark had city water, when he was sent to draw water from the well at this house, so there may not have been running water, i. e., there may have been no electric pump for the well – if this fuzzy memory is accurate. My recollection is that the well was perhaps 100 feet behind – or east of – the house, near the barn.)

The 1910 census suggests the family had an earlier Newark residence on the Magness Road (this was probably, strictly speaking, a Newark-area residence, since it was probably outside the city limits, but it was within the school district – my dad once told me a motivation for the family to move to Newark was that the Newark school was better than the one in Pleasant Plains). I remember an approximately one-acre property on the Magness Road (i.e., the road between Newark and Magness – Magness is about two miles west of Newark) was included in the G. M. Fields estate that Aunt Ruby administered when I was a boy living in Newark. Also, I remember an old house – essentially abandoned -- on that property when I was a very young boy in Newark (along with an old, falling-down, barn or stable, I believe). I think the house was demolished in the late 1950s. My recollection is that Allan Ramey and his wife, my cousin George Ann (Magness) Ramey, purchased this lot when real properties in the G. M. Fields estate were finally sold off (auctioned) around 1967 or 1968.

I do remember my dad and his brothers talking once about how their house (probably the one on Long Street) had a “Delco.” I think this means they had a generator (probably powered by a gasoline engine) outside the house (or possibly in an outbuilding), which provided electricity for lights at night – in the days before there power was generally available in Newark from a public utility.

My grandfather (Dad’s father) apparently owned farmland in the “bottoms” (river bottomland) south of Newark, including some on the Oil Trough side of the White River. My dad and his brothers used to tell stories about working on the farmland as boys. Some of them – especially my dad -- seemed to have left home as soon as possible, and (with the exception of Uncle Lacy) to have avoided that kind of work for much of their lives thereafter. However, in the case of my dad, there seems to have been a brief return to farming, after his father’s death in the late 1930s (I know this from a newspaper advertisement dealing with alfalfa hay from around 1938 – also, see the item about the 1940 census, below). At the time I was growing up (1950s), the only farmland owned by the G. M. Fields estate was on the Newark side of the river (although a portion of that farmland was on Padgett Island, which is technically in the river -- across the slough from the Newark side; the slough is an old river channel).

He once told me that he clearly remembered getting his first pair of “long pants.” Apparently, when he was young (perhaps the era of 1904-1915), boys wore knickers and getting one’s first pair of long pants was a rite of passage. He also told me once about, during a visit to Kansas (probably around 1975) going with his step-grandson, Steve Barnes, to a Dale Carnegie class he (Steve) was taking. After everyone in the class had given their speech assignments for the evening, the instructor asked if any guests wanted to speak. Apparently one of the speeches had mentioned a bathing suit. Dad apparently spoke briefly about how he could remember the first bathing suit he had ever seen, which was perhaps when he was around 10. In those days, young boys swam in “swimming holes” (deep spots in creeks) and they swam in the nude. [I suspect he and I may have swam in the same spot in Thomas Creek, which was then slightly northwest of Newark. In “my day” the spot we went to was known as Soaphole. When I told him about this, he couldn’t remember if he had heard that name before (the spot might have had other names in earlier times). I believe Soaphole was in the area that is now under Lake Newark, formed when Thomas Creek was dammed, perhaps 25-30 years ago. Also, I’m guessing the city limits have been extended so that area is probably within the city now.]

My dad told me he quit school in 9^th grade (not sure if it was in, i. e., during, the 9^th grade, or after the 9^th grade). It is likely that when my dad attended school one graduated (in Newark, at least) after the 11^th grade. [This possibility is based on a statement from my Aunt Ruby. She told me they changed graduation from the end of 11 years to the end of 12 years while she was in school (and still in the lower grades). She said she thought they were going to continue adding grades, so she would never get out. She was about 8 years younger than my dad.]

He told me he got a job working as a clerk in a store in Oklahoma (Tulsa Oklahoma, I think) when he was about 16 (after leaving school). I had the impression that it might have been something like a feed store. I wonder if he had family in that area that I never knew about – one of the many questions I should have asked, but didn’t. (In a safe deposit box back in Pennsylvania – as I write this in 2012, there should be a tape recording of an interview I made with dad long ago. Hopefully, I was smart enough to ask a few of those questions during that interview, and the answers are on that tape – probably not though.)

His activities during the 1920s are largely unknown to me. If he dropped out of school at age 16, that would have been 1920 (he was in Newark at the time of the 1920 census). He got married in Independence County (to Ena Alyce/Alice McNairy) in 1925. He told me he first went to Detroit, Michigan (to work in the auto industry) in 1929. Also, I think he worked in a factory in Anderson Indiana for a time in the 1920s. He also talked about once having owned a store, which he “lost” “during the depression.” I always imagined it was something like a candy/cigarette/convenience store, but I’m uncertain why I have this impression. Also, I always assumed (from the “during the depression” statement) that he had opened the store around 1930. However, thinking more about it since his death, it is possible that he opened the store in the 1937-1938 era, using funds inherited from his father (if indeed they did divide up any liquid assets from the estate at that time – the real property – land and buildings -- from the estate was not divided up until around 1967 or 1968, to the best of my memory as I write this in 2009; hopefully I will someday have an opportunity investigate Independence County court records on that estate). [Later (2012): population schedules from the 1940 census were released in early April 2012. These seem to indicate Dad was living with his stepmother in Newark in April 1940, and was farming (the 1940 census also indicated he had lived in Newark in 1935).]

I did not know about his first marriage until I reached age perhaps 10 or 12. I remember looking at the “baby book” that Aunt Ruby had prepared when her elder daughter George Ann Magness was an infant (George Ann was born in the summer of 1932). I imagine I looked at this book around 1954, when Aunt Ruby’s first grandchild was born (a time when I was quite interested in babies – as were others in the family). Names of people who had visited baby George Ann (or perhaps who had sent presents) were entered in the book, including Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Fields. I knew that my parents had not married until around 1943, so this previous (1932) “Mrs. Ralph Fields” was, initially, a mystery to me. My impression at the time was that “Mrs. Fields” had made the entry in the book (I’m fairly certain it wasn’t in my dad’s handwriting, which I would have recognized). However, thinking more on the subject now, it could be that Aunt Ruby wrote the name, based on having received a gift from them by mail.

As indicated in the family history narrative report for my father, a person named Ralph Fields is listed in the Detroit City directory for 1928-29. It is unclear if this is the Ralph Fields of interest or if it is another individual of the same name. One would suspect the information in a "1928-29" city directory would be collected in 1927 or 1928. My recollection is that Ralph Fields claimed to have moved to Detroit in 1929. This address (on the south side of Ledyard) appears to be directly across the street from the southwest quadrant of Cass Park (the current -- 2010 -- location of Cass Technical High School, but this Cass Tech building was constructed around 2005 or 2006). Prior to then, the school was located about one block south of the current site). The 1930 census seems to have two different people named Ralph Fields living in Detroit. These are probably two different people, but there is a small chance my father was listed twice in that census. The one who is likely not my father is listed as a 25-year-old welder at a “body factory” (probably a factory manufacturing automobile bodies), who was born in Tennessee (and both parents listed as born in Tennessee – my dad was born in Arkansas). This “Tennessee” Ralph Fields is listed a living as a boarder at 1131 Junction. This street is on the west side, just north of Fort Street, slightly west of the Ambassador Bridge (not close to the Ledyard address). All of the people at the boarding house were from Tennessee or Missouri. My dad (at age 25) is listed in the 1930 census as living in Detroit with Alice. If this Tennessee-born boarder is also him, he was listed twice in the 1930 census.

As I was writing these recollections, I realized that I don’t have a very good idea of what kinds of work my dad did prior to when he started his own business (described below). I think he described himself as a factory worker. However, I also heard him refer to himself as a drill press operator. I believe he also once told me he worked for General Motors for 10 years (but that number may have had some roundoff or “rounding up” associated with it – or it may mean “on and off” if included some long periods of being laid off. I have an installment contract indicating he worked at (if I recall correctly) a place called Detroit Transmission around 1951. It’s unclear if that is an independent company or the name of a unit or division of a larger company (such as General Motors).

I have a wooden toolbox that he gave me when I was perhaps age 10 or 12. It is what I think of as the toolbox of a machinist of a skilled craftsman, with several pullout drawers for smaller delicate tools. At one time (when he first gave it to me), it contained perhaps two micrometers (precision measuring devices) and perhaps some shims and blocks that (I presume) were used to calibrate precise measurements. Thus he may have been at least a semi-skilled worker of some type (although I’ve never heard of him completing anything like a formal apprenticeship program).

He once told me about attending part of the World’s Fair of 1933 in Chicago. The thing he mentioned in particular was that, at one show he attended during that fair, someone standing in the audience fainted. The announcer or master of ceremonies more or less incorporated it into the act when he sent an usher over to help, saying something like, “Only one?” (as if people fainted all the time, and in groups – and, indeed, it probably had happened more than once). I believe Dad said that he thought the master of ceremonies at this particular show had been entertainer Jan Murray, who (much later) was the host of at least one TV game show.

One clipping I have encountered from the Newark (Arkansas) newspaper indicates my dad was living in Newark for a time in 1937. The clipping seems to be an advertisement dealing with him having alfalfa hay for sale. His father died in April 1937. I have a recollection that dad once told me he had been the administrator of his father’s estate (at least for a time). It is possible that he lived in Arkansas for some time after his father’s death – perhaps managing the farm until harvest was completed (if, for example, G. M. Fields had still been “farming” the land he owned south of Newark, that is, managing the farming operations, using hired labor). This might have been necessary if crops had been planted prior to the death of G. M. Fields (or if he died so near to planting time that there was not enough time to make arrangements to rent the land to someone else – during my childhood, when I lived in Arkansas, the land, still held in the estate, was rented – to B. F. McDoniel, if I recall correctly).

The home in Newark where my dad and his brothers and sisters grew up burned in 1938 (that’s my memory of the year I heard). The story I heard was that he had been in the house the night it caught fire and had barely escaped – possibly he had difficulty waking up because he had been drinking heavily the night before (I have a very hazy memory that I MIGHT have heard that someplace, but I not sure).

My father said throughout my life (or the portion of my lifetime that overlapped with his) that he was an alcoholic (although, with one exception, he did not drink during my memory – he was probably what Alcoholics Anonymous would call a recovering alcoholic; he was never in an AA, program to my knowledge). Once when we were in a bar (during daytime, for purposes of his business) he made a remark something along the lines that he had “spent 20 years of his life in places like this”. I think that was in a question (perhaps from one of his employees) about why he didn’t go to bars (other that in connection with his business). I only remember him taking one drink during my lifetime – one very cold night in Detroit when he had been outside and came into the apartment shivering. The drink was from a bottle of whiskey (or something – schnapps, perhaps) that someone had left there, and which (if I recall correctly) had been untouched on a shelf in the kitchen cabinet for 2-3 years. I’m guessing he stopped drinking within a year of two after I was born – or perhaps even before then.

He had a serious illness around 1940, which he apparently believed was associated with his drinking. It was a bleeding ulcer, and required that he received several units of blood. I later met at least one person (whose last name was Brown) who had donated blood for him at the time he was hospitalized (in Detroit’s Receiving Hospital, I believe) for this illness. (I imagine the blood donation was to replace units in the hospital’s inventory – not that Dad actually received any of the blood donated by his friends.)

When I was a youngster, he would sometimes take me to eat at a café on Woodward Avenue, in the area of the intersection of Clairmount and Woodward, in Detroit (there actually may have been 2 or 3 different eating places in that area that we went to occasionally). He had lived in this neighborhood at one time. Indeed, when I became interested in family history research, I found records (such as the 1930 census) indicating he had lived sort of “around the corner” from that intersection in the early 1930s – the street he lived on, Leicester Court, is one block roughly north of Clairmount). It’s kind of jumbled in my memory, but it is possible that Clairmount and Woodward mightt not have been too far from the Algiers Motel, which was the scene of a violent incident during the 1967 Detroit riots; there was later a book published with a title something like The Algiers Motel Incident.

He was friendly with the owners or managers of the two of three restaurants we would occasionally go to in the Clairmount/Woodward area. They apparently remembered him from when he lived in this area in the 1930, and also possibly when he lived there again around 1950 (which is discussed later). Some of them may also have been among the earliest customers for his business. I’d never thought of it until I started writing this material, but I imagine having these relationships over a period perhaps 30 years, or more, speaks well of him.

Three friends of my dad’s who stand out in my memory from my early childhood are: Frank Kellerher, Pete Williams, and Charles Tyner.

My memories of Frank are that he was a Spanish-American War veteran. He also did leatherwork as a hobby (I think it was a hobby), making at least one holster for one of my toy guns (he may have also made a holster that I remember having for my ray gun from the old “Space Patrol” Saturday morning TV show). My recollection of Frank is that he had dark hair – and, to me, at the time, he did not seem all that much older than my Dad – although he clearly was, if he was a Spanish-American War veteran. He also took me to a Detroit Tigers baseball game around 1954 or 1955 – and at that time he was already suffering from the cancer of his mouth that eventually led to his death (not sure if it was cancer of cheek, or gums, or jaw). This may have been the baseball game that I remember where Detroit was playing the Boston Red Sox and someone, probably Dad, had told me, prior to the game, to especially watch Ted Williams, Boston’s best player. Well, in that game, Ted Williams hit two home runs. I left thinking he did that in every game.

Pete Williams had white hair, and was probably an alcoholic. He may have been a veteran of World War I – he may have been receiving some kind of pension from this during the early 1950s. I remember hearing that Pete sometimes baby sat for me when I was very young. He also sometimes worked for my dad, part time, in Dad’s business in the early 1950s. Dad used told a story about how Pete was eating breakfast at Dad’s at one time (when I was a youngster and in Detroit – or perhaps I had been visiting and the “kid’s cereal was left over from my stay) and bit into a “prize” or premium in one of my kid’s cereals (probably something like a whistle or a deputy sheriff’s badge).

Charles Tyner owned a service station on Woodward Avenue in the 1950s (perhaps not too far from the Clairmount/Woodward intersection) – and had a large home someplace on the eastern side of Detroit, I believe (large by 1950s standards). He also had two daughters, both much older than me. I believe “Charlie” was at least 10-15 years older than my dad (and he, and/or his wife, may have originally been Canadian – he was born in 1885, if I remember correctly). Dad once told a story about how Tyner had figured out early in World War II that tires (and perhaps some other auto components) would eventually become difficult to obtain. He hoarded as much of this stuff as he could obtain (and that would fit into the basement of his home – and perhaps in his attic too). Then he sold it (at a substantial profit) to favored customers. A war profiteer, in other words – but, I suspect, a jovial and generous one. In Dad’s story, when someone told Charlie about the need for something, such as a certain size tire or fan belt, Charlie would say something like he thought he might be able to get hold of one. Usually, he knew he already had the desired item stored in his basement.

Around 1959, both of Tyner’s sons-in-law, together with probably three of his grandsons, were killed in a boating accident (involving a fire/explosion, if I recall correctly) on Lake St. Clair (I think Charlie had been at least part owner of the boat, which I remember seeing at one point – perhaps after it was recovered after the accident – I remember a highly varnished wooden hull, on maybe a 20-22 ft boat, but not a cabin cruiser – perhaps what might be called a cigarette boat). I think at least some of the victims had survived the initial accident, but then drowned or died after some hours from exposure (or maybe the combined effect of exposure and injuries from the fire/explosion).

My memory is that this accident had been a page one story in at least one of the Detroit newspapers. However, none of us recognized that the people involved were related to Charlie and his wife until someone called Dad the next day (the victims had his sons-in-law’s surnames, which I guess Dad did not recognize – my memory is that one family had a Polish surname). Dad, JB Moss, and I went to a funeral. My memory is that the funeral we went to was a triple funeral (one son-in-law and two grandsons, but my memory is pretty fuzzy). Perhaps someday I will try to find a copy of the newspaper coverage of this event.

Charlie “retired” (probably in the late 1950s), selling his station on Woodward Avenue (and I think my dad continued to do business for a time with the new owner, who I can vaguely picture in my memory, but I can’t remember his name). However, Charlie, after a couple years of retirement, later opened (or took over) a “second” station much farther out of the central city of Detroit. I have “second” in quotes because I also vaguely recall some discussions about a station he had earlier – before the one I remember on Woodward Avenue (which may actually have been his second station). The one I recall on Woodward Avenue is the “old” type of service station (before the advent of “self serve”). Attendants would come out to the pump island to put gas into customer’s fuel tanks. Also, there were two service bays, and usually a mechanic who could do many types of repairs.

Tyner later retired to a house on US Highway 23, not too far from Flint Michigan (or maybe it was some distance away, but close enough so that his mailing address was Flint). He initially had 10 acres, but some land (probably less than an acre) was sold to (or maybe taken by) the state when US-23 was widened to become a 4-lane, limited access highway. I remember visiting there 2 or 3 times, probably as a teenager – and maybe once while in high school or college. One thing I recall is Mrs. Tyner showing photos (and maybe other mementoes) from her time working in a factory during World War II. I believe she had a large group photo of the entire factory work force – the kind of photo that is much wider than it is high, taken with a camera that pans across the group of people. An important thing I remember from visiting there is that they had a photo of my dad (taken probably sometime in the 1930s). In the photo, he was sitting behind the steering wheel of large roadster (possibly a Packard) that had spare tires mounted on (or near) the running boards on both sides of the car. It’s a photo that I would now dearly love to have a copy of. Mr. and Mrs. Tyner had known that Mom (Edith) and Dad were coming to visit that Sunday and had taken to trouble to locate this photo and have it ready to show us (and maybe a couple other mementoes too – things I’ve forgotten now, if that was indeed the case).

Dad once told me about traveling from Detroit (or Toledo, perhaps) to, I think, Buffalo New York by boat (ferry?). He was up all night dancing on the trip. (Knowing him only later in his life, it’s difficult to imagine this.) This might have been a portion of a trip that took him to New Jersey. It could have been that wartime gas rationing made it desirable (or imperative) to have one’s car transported by ferry as far as possible for a trip like that.

I’m not sure how he came to be in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, working in a factory, at the time he met my mother. I seem to remember once him talking about the job he had there. I think he was talking about waste on wartime government contracts. The story I remember is that he worked in a place where the items being manufactured (perhaps something like generators or pumps – my impression was something roughly the size of a car engine) somehow traveled though the shop on some kind of overhead conveyor system, with a serial number associated with each item (perhaps on a tag or perhaps painted on the item). He had been instructed to write down certain model numbers or serial numbers on his time record (time card), whether he actually worked on the item or not. I believe the address on a November 1943 marriage record I have for them indicates he was living perhaps 8 or 10 houses away from 272 Market Street at the time of their marriage.

I once (perhaps more than once) heard him tell people (his family and friends) about the mechanism used at my grandmother’s house in Perth Amboy, NJ to hang clothes out the clothesline without walking outside. The clotheslines (which I remember, vaguely) extended from the house to a post near the back of the lot (the back of the back yard). Each clothesline was a closed loop running thru pulleys at each end. One could stand in the house (or possibly on a back porch) and hang clothes on the line (or remove them) while standing in one spot. At the time I remember, the house was divided into two apartments (one upstairs and one downstairs) and there was a clothesline for each apartment (both ending at the same backyard post, I believe). I don’t remember if the “house ends” of the clotheslines were near windows or if one (or both) could be accessed from a porch (or porches) at the rear of the house. This was in the days before electric and gas clothes dryers became nearly as common as now, of course. I don’t think my dad had ever seen a clothesline of this type until he met his in-laws. I do not recall that he ever got anyone else interested in adopting such a clothesline.

When I was a little boy (probably 1949 and early 1950), my dad drove a 1936 Ford (I think it was a 2-door, but it might have been a 4-door). He was operating his business at that time (probably part time), and he had a rack on the top of the car holding his ladders. I recall he got stopped once for running a red light (and he knew it right away and realized there was a police car right behind him – I remember him saying these things to me, even before the policeman turned on his siren or blinked his lights – or whatever -- to signal Dad to stop ). The policeman (who I recall as being quite polite) asked if he was a painter or something, having observed the ladders as he was standing behind the car writing the ticket). Dad had the back seat (the horizontal cushion/spring assembly) removed from this car in order to provide more space to hold his tools and work-related equipment, such as vacuum cleaners (I remember the “back seat” area had no “seat”– I also sort of remember that he had that rear seat cushion/spring set stored someplace, perhaps in a garage where he kept some tools and supplies – he may have retained it to be able to re-install it before the car was sold or traded in).

I remember that on this traffic ticket occasion (and on many other occasions when I was a youngster) I stood on the (bench type) front passenger seat while the car was in motion. When he would brake the car to a stop, he would put his right arm our horizontally to hold me – so that I would not move toward the dashboard due to inertia. This was, of course, in pre-seat-belt and pre-child-restraint-system days.

We went to Arkansas in the 1936 Ford car on the trip when he took me to begin staying with my Aunt Ruby in Arkansas (this was probably in March 1950). Somewhat before that trip, I had purchased a box holding about 25 rolls of caps for a cap pistol. These came in “super” rolls where a “cylinder,” perhaps the size of a roll of pennies, was made up of about 5 individual rolls (with the cylinder perforated to enable cleanly breaking off the individual rolls). Each individual roll fit into a cap pistol – and each of these gave perhaps 25 or 50 “shots” (gunfire “bang” noises). There were probably about 5 of these “super” cylinders in the box. I later heard my dad telling people that he endured my shooting with the cap pistol during the initial parts of the trip, thinking that eventually I would run out of caps. He had not, at first, realized that I had such a large supply of caps (the 1950 equivalent of an “economy size” package, I guess). I also remember how when he told me we were going to Arkansas (for this 1950 trip), I couldn’t remember having been there before (something he had difficulty comprehending). However, as soon as we arrived at the home of Aunt Ruby and Uncle Hanford, I recognized the exterior of their house (probably from a September 1948 trip, which is discussed below).

He once told me about an earlier trip when he drove to Arkansas with two almost-identical 1936 (or thereabouts) Fords, with one car towing the other. I presume he sold the towed one once he reached Arkansas. It is possible this was perhaps a year or two after the end of World War II, when there was a shortage of cars, since few, if any, had been manufactured during World War II, as factories were converted to war production (I want to say “no cars” instead of “few,” but it is possible that a small number were made under government contracts for government/military use). The earlier trip may have been the trip in 1946 or 1947 (probably 1947), when my mother went with him to Arkansas (I later heard from my Aunt Ruby and my cousins George Ann and Bennie that they met her during such a trip).

There was another trip to Arkansas in the late 1940s (where I went with him) when his stepmother (Sarah – or Sallie – Childress Arnold Fields) died, and we went there for her funeral. My (very fuzzy) recollection is that we went by train on that trip. This would have been in late September 1948. My mother Jeanette would have been about 6 months pregnant at that time, which may have been the reason she did not also go (and perhaps the reason he and I went by train instead of him driving – that is, he may have felt he couldn’t drive and also “take care” of me, a 3-year-old then, during such a long trip, if it was just him and I – thinking about it now, I wonder if taking me on that trip was out of respect to his stepmother, or if it was to “show me off” to his brothers, his sister, and others who would be at the funeral). When I was an adolescent in the 1950s, the trip driving from Detroit to Arkansas was a long 1.5-days (that’s with a very early start the first day). It’s possible that in the 1940s, when roads and cars were not quite as good as in the 1950s, the trip could have been closer to two full days. One memory I have from the 1949 trip (one of the few) was that his stepmother’s body was laid out in a casket in the living room of the house Aunt Ruby and Uncle Hanford owned in Newark. I think I recall kind of a tent-like, light-colored veil over the open part of the casket.

I once heard him talk about how his brothers had sent him money at the lowest time of his life (when my mother died); a time he really needed the money (I probably heard him talk about this when I was in my mid- or late-teens). It sounded like this was one of several reasons he felt so close to his brothers in his later years. [Later, around 2008, I had occasion to examine some papers (including bank statements and cancelled checks) from this time. It appears that a bank account was opened for him in Arkansas and $700 was deposited in it. I presume this is the money he was talking about. It appears that he didn’t have any Bank of Newark checks available to use to draw funds out of this account, but that other checks were altered (or generic checks were used) for him to draw funds from this account to pay bills (such as for my mother’s funeral). I was probably given these papers by Edith, my stepmother, in the early 1980s – some time after my dad died. However, I do not recall looking at them closely until around 2008, when Donna mailed them to me in South Carolina after “finding” them in her house – the house Donna and I had shared from 1974 to 1986. I’m not sure if I looked at them in the early 1980s and have forgotten, or if I did not look at them then, either from lack of time, or just not having the heart to do it, from sadness at my dad’s passing and/or the stress I was feeling from issues with acting as administrator of his estate. My recollection is that the package included a cancelled check for $490 for Jeanette’s funeral.]

Some time in the early 1960s, the wife of a neighbor in Detroit died (we called the neighbor “Mr. Steve,” partly because he had a difficult-to-pronounce surname, possibly Polish or Hungarian). I heard my dad tell Mr. Steve that he (Mr. Steve) should be cautious about making important decisions while he was still stunned from the death of his wife. I think Dad may have indicated to the neighbor that he (my dad) had lost a wife and knew how one felt in that position. I don’t think Dad said anything explicit, but I sort of remember thinking to myself that my dad was probably referring to making a decision that led to the chain of events following the death of Dad’s second wife in 1949 (my mother), which led to adoption of his newborn daughter by family members . (“Mr. Steve” lived at an address in the vicinity of house number 451 on Willis Avenue in Detroit – it was on the side of the street where the house numbers were odd numbers, probably with a number within 20, plus or minus, of Number 451.)

I remember when I was quite small, there were times when people asked Dad how many children he had, and he answered: two, that he had a little girl, in addition to me. However, I believe (at some point) he stopped mentioning his daughter when he was asked something like that. I imagine he (and perhaps also the other family members ) did not think carefully about the implications of “taking her away” from them when she reached the age of, say, two or three – how hard, and possibly traumatic, it would be on her, and on them (and, I imagine that in early 1949, after my mother’s death, no one thought that the period of temporary care would last that long). I suspect allowing them to permanently adopt her (probably around 1952) was a very difficult decision for him (and probably a heartbreaking one). I also imagine the time after Jeanette’s death was difficult financially. I’m sure there were hospital bills (in addition to the funeral). I’m not sure where he was working then (the beginning of 1949, or if he was – it was never clear to me why "we” were in New Jersey when that daughter, my sisterwas born).

I have some insight into how difficult it is to leave familiar surroundings as a child. I stayed in Arkansas (in Newark -- living with my Aunt and Uncle) far longer that I "had” to (or should have). I suspect this hurt him (that I preferred to live with someone other than my own father) – and it’s something I continue to feel badly about. However, I don’t even recall him complaining or being resentful about it. On the other hand, he too had grown up in Newark. Perhaps he had some insight into the appeal it had for me.

I’m not sure if dad every realized the coincidence that three generations of us – his father, him, and me -- all had our mothers die when we were young boys (about age 9 for his father, about age 7 for him, and (just barely) age 4 for me).

Around the middle of 1950, he purchased a black Chevrolet “panel truck” – except that it had sort of a passenger car type body in the front, so its roofline was somewhat lower that what I think of as a “real” panel truck. It was probably, in effect, a two-door station wagon (plus a rear door), but with solid side panels aft of the two front doors (no windows). This 1950 Chevrolet model or sub-model or “line” had a special name (which I could not remember as this was initially written on 4 Jan 2010; however, I did some internet searching on 17 February 2010 which indicated it might have been called a Sedan Delivery, which is how I’m going to refer to it here). I have a vague recollection that back in those days “model” often referred to the year (such as 1950), not something like the “line” (like Chevrolet Impala or Bel Aire – both names that probably came into being after 1950). Incidentally, the day I did the internet lookup mentioned above (17 Feb 2010) would have been my dad’s 106^th birthday. For about 4 years, he used that black sedan delivery as a combination business and personal vehicle. When he made trips to Arkansas, he would take all of his equipment out of it and clean it (as best the inside could be cleaned – some equipment would accumulate grease, which transferred to the interior of the vehicle). In one of his later panel trucks, he had an unvarnished, unpainted wooden storage compartment built on one side of the back of the truck (shaped sort of like a cedar chest, but made of a cheaper type of wood). I don’t remember if the sedan delivery also had this.

My dad’s business was initially named Ventilation Cleaning Service. The name later became A Ventilation Cleaning Service, and, still later, AAA Ventilation Cleaning Service. The “A’s” did not stand for anything. They were there solely to obtain an earlier alphabetic listing in the Yellow Pages telephone directory. This directory listing was apparently the primary source of obtaining work for his business.

My dad’s most common description of his business was something like he “cleaned air conditioning.” However, it was somewhat more complicated that that. First, a common part of the business was cleaning restaurant kitchen exhaust systems (from the hoods over the stoves in restaurant and institutional kitchens continuing through the ductwork, filters, and exhaust fans). This was done with scrapers and solvents. In the 1950s, there were many restaurants that did a lot of frying, so the hood and ductwork could accumulate a lot of thick, black grease. My recollection is that Chinese Restaurants (which deep-fried in corn oil) were especially difficult to clean (I would go with him occasionally as a small boy, and later worked for him, off and on, when I was a teen-ager). For a time, in the early days (when I was a youngster) he used industrial vacuum cleaners (operating in reverse) to “blow” a white powder up into the ductwork (not sure what the powder was – lime perhaps?). Many years later I noticed he no longer seemed to do that and I asked him why. He said that an attorney representing someone claiming to have a patent on some part of that process had written him, and he stopped doing it.

A second type of task was using a pressurized water spray (and sometimes pressurized steam) to wash out the cooling coils of air conditioning units (and often the condensing coils too, if I recall correctly). He began doing this around 1953 or 1954 with a steam jenny (“Jenny” may be a brand name). Then he got a water pump system that generally worked just as well. The water supply was in a tank (basically a horizontally-mounted 55-gallon drum); a detergent was added to the spray. The steam jenny was retained for use on some especially tough jobs.

Bars were a frequent customer (especially in the early days of his business) because some of then had exhaust hoods over stoves in kitchen areas. In addition, they would often have refrigeration units for walk-in refrigerators and/or (perhaps more common) coolers or chillers (also often of walk-in size) were kegs of beer attached to the taps were kept. Often these “cooler rooms” were large enough so a few not-yet-tapped kegs also might be stored in them).

[I have a very early memory – perhaps when I was only about 4 or 5, when he had purchased some kind of small hand pump and was experimenting with a water spray in a bathtub. In my memory, the pump he had looked something like a hand-powered bicycle pump, the fluid being pumped was water – bath water in this case – not air. I asked about this many years later. He said it was an early attempt to find some method of cleaning air conditioning coils. Also at about this time – when I was perhaps 5 or 6 -- he took apart one of his vacuum cleaners while sitting on the floor of his apartment, to do some kind of repair, I imagine. In order to keep me “occupied” – and out of his way – he had put aside an old (broken) alarm clock for me to take apart at the same time he was taking apart the vacuum cleaner, using the same set of tools that he was using. Of course, he later re-assembled the vacuum cleaner. I didn’t do the same with the alarm clock I had taken apart.]

Around 1954 he purchased a red flatbed Chevrolet truck to hold (and transport) the steam jenny (with wood “stake” sideboards and a canvas top over the bed – there was a framework of aluminum tubing to hold up the canvas top – I can’t remember if the sideboards were outside or inside the canvas top – probably inside). The steam jenny had something like a kerosene burner inside it, to act as the heat source to make the steam. The canvas top had to be rolled back (toward the cab of the truck) to allow ventilation (and heat to escape) when using the steam jenny. The flatbed truck was later also used to hold the water pump cleaner (but the water pump cleaner would also fit into at least the “full-sized” panel trucks, I believe). He also had several panel trucks (generally one after the other, I believe). His last truck may have been more of a minivan. Somehow, I don’t have strong memories of these individual vehicles.

A third aspect of his business was to clean the inside of large air handling ducts. In most cases, this was in large industrial or office buildings – sometimes so large that a worker could actually crawl through the duct dragging a relatively small industrial vacuum cleaner through the duct with them. He had some tank-type vacuum cleaners (with cylindrical tanks – the cylinder axis being vertical and the unit mounted on casters), but the smaller ones used bags to capture the vacuum exhaust. The tank-type vacuums could pick up water spillage from the pressure spray units.

Air conditioning (with refrigeration units) was not nearly so common in many businesses in the early 1950s as it is now – especially in Michigan, where it is needed only a small fraction of the year. However, forced ventilation and heating was common in large buildings. He may have cleaned ductwork in some buildings that had only this forced ventilation type of “air conditioning” (with no refrigeration system).

It is a bit fuzzy to me when he started his business. I seem to remember that he told me he “learned” about the business when he had a job doing the kind of work for someone else in Detroit. I think for some years (perhaps 1948-1950), he essentially ran the business as a sideline, working the business part time, while he worked full time in a factory. I have a vague recollection that (for a time around 1949 -- or perhaps the early 1950s -- he had an answering service, and perhaps a mail drop, at an office building that I recall visiting with him at least once (when he stopped to pick up messages).

There was one time (probably in early 1960s) I went with him (and probably some of his other workers) to restaurant job (probably cleaning a grease hood, but my memory is not clear). There was a second contractor in the restaurant cleaning a grease trap, which was a device (a rectangular metal box that, I believe, was part of the drainage system for the sink used to wash large pots and pans). Most of the grease trap was below floor level, but the slightly rounded top projected perhaps an inch or so above floor level. The contractor had removed bolts that held the lid and was manually scooping out some very smelly goop that had accumulated in the drain. The odor was extremely unpleasant – a type of odor that almost made me ill. I said something to my dad about this. He said there had been times when he had done this type of work. I assume this would have been in the early or mid-1940s, when he had a job doing the “cleaning” work for someone else. (My vague memory of the place we were working was that the restaurant was closed and was having contractors in to do stuff at that time, so it would not interfere with operations. I’m not sure if they closed one day per week, or perhaps one week per year, or perhaps did not open until lunch and we were there during early morning.)

He once told me that my mother (Jeanette) provided marketing support in his early days of the business (prior to her death). She would make cold calls to restaurants (and, I presume, other businesses) soliciting business, reciting a script (which, I imagine, she had written). After my dad’s death in 1980, my stepmother gave me some miscellaneous papers from the era of the 1940s that had been retained (quite likely by accident, or by inertia). Among these were some 3-by-5-inch index cards in Jeanette’s handwriting that appear to have been notes from these calls (phone numbers, addresses, and sometimes a notation about who she talked to and their degree of interest). One of the items seems to have been a script for what she said during the call. He said that, if asked, she would say she was not using a script. Based on odds and ends of various brief conversations with my dad over the years, I suspect his entry in business was, in part, driven by Jeanette. He mentioned to me that she had essentially been involved in small businesses all her life (with her parents as merchants and herself working as a pharmacist), so she was quite comfortable with him starting a small business.

With a few exceptions, he used all temporary part-time employees – often employees who had been working for him on-and-off for several years – and, in many cases, people who had regular full time factory jobs, who would work for Dad on weekends and nights. For the air conditioning jobs especially, the work was often scheduled for nights and on weekends, when office facilities would not be occupied (so as to not interfere with the normal work of the business occupying the building).

Some of these employees were usually referred to by their first name and/or by nicknames. Partly because of that (but mostly because of the passage of so many years – as I’m starting to write this particular paragraph in March 2010), I don’t remember many of the employees’ “real” names. Here is a partial list (which I may expand if more names come to me): Pete Williams (in 1950s), Art Taylor, Stanley ??? (I believe Art and Stanley were married to sisters), Hovie J. (“Buster”) Westmoreland (the “J” was probably Jeff or Jeffrey, since he had a son named Jeff – or some variation of that), J. B. Moss (Edith’s son-in-law), Sonny (a black man – one of his few Negro employees; quite possibly the only one), Bob Lillis (a person of small stature – what was then called a “midget” – very useful for climbing and crawling in ventilation ducts to clean them), Sam (a WW II veteran, who had been wounded in action), “Little Willie”, Bob? Williams? (his brother or brother-in-law also worked for dad), Brown (that was his surname – he was mostly just called Brown, and I don’t remember his given name – Brown worked for him during the 1960s that I knew of, but that had know each other earlier; Brown was one of the people who had donated blood for Dad during his 1940 illness), John Robert Barnes (another of Edith’s sons-in-law – would have worked for dad only briefly around 1953-54), and “Arnett” (his name might have been James Arnett, although it’s possible I might have his name confused with the television actor from the 1955-1975 era). Of these, I suspect that only Art Taylor and J. B. Moss (both very hard workers) were the only ones who worked full time for any substantial period of time – and they would have been with him on that status for only a few years each (and they were not full time at the same time). [I remember that Buster gave me one of the best pieces of advice I ever had, when I first obtained a driver’s license. He said that whenever I was driving and a ball bounced on the road in front of me, I should slow down – almost come to a stop. This was because there is almost always a child or a dog (or both) coming into the road right behind that ball. Dad had a joke about Buster. It was along the lines that Dad didn’t know what Buster’s religion was, but apparently part of it was that it was sinful to keep whiskey in the house overnight.]

He kept his work-related equipment in rented garages. The first one of these that I remember (probably from around 1952) was a small corner of a garage that I seem to remember as being off Second Street, someplace in the vicinity of Highland Park, Michigan (a community that was completely surrounded by Detroit – but, legally, or governmentally, a separate municipality). Later, when he lived at 500 West Willis, he rented a garage that was associated with a Wayne State University fraternity house that faced the street immediately south of Willis Avenue (which might have been Selden Avenue, or possibly Alexanderine – my memory is hazy on this). The access to the garage was from the alley that ran east-west in the block between Willis and the other street (the alley was parallel to Willis and the other street; the two ends of the alley were on Cass and Second). I believe he may have had two adjacent rented garages at this alley location for a few years.

It’s quite likely there was at least one rented garage “between” (in time) these two locations, but if so, my memory of it has faded.

Most of my dad’s business transactions seemed to start from phone calls, made to him in response to advertisements in the Michigan Bell Yellow Pages directories. In the very early days, he had some kind of answering service (one I barely remember). However, once he married Mom (Edith) she answered the phone, which meant she had to stay home much of the day (or else limit her outside activities to times when Dad was available to answer the phone). I think that after a time this feeling of a duty to be “chained” to the phone had a bad effect on her, both mentally and physically – and on their relationship. They had two phone lines, so personal calls could be made during the day, while still keeping the business line open for possible incoming calls from potential customers. My memory is that the numbers (before the days of all-digit numbers) were TEmple 1-2707 and TEmple 1-2708, with the one ending in “7” being the number listed for the business in yellow pages, etc. If one line was being used, calls would switch over onto the other one. The “Temple” probably came from the presence of The Masonic Temple, perhaps 8 or 9 blocks south of the Willis addresses. An earlier phone number he had been from a TRinity exchange. I don’t remember the whole number, but I believe it ended in the digits “959”.

He almost always would go “walk down” a job before giving a price quotation. For larger jobs, factories would sometimes send him “blueprint” drawings of the buildings where the work was to be performed. He seldom spent much time looking at these (in part because he had little expertise in reading drawings of this type – although he could sometimes make use of the drawing after having seen the building).

His business trucks were all red (except for the 1950 Sedan Delivery, which was black). For a long time (many years), he did not have the name of his business painted on the side of the truck. I asked about this once. He said he was concerned that (because of the nature of his business) he would, at times, be working in suburban communities where he might not have the appropriate license (or other paperwork) – perhaps, unknowingly. In the Detroit area it is often very difficult to tell where the exact boundaries of the various communities are, unless one is “well within” Detroit itself, i.e., it’s difficult to tell if you are in the city or in a suburb (and, if you were in the suburbs, it was often difficult to determine where one started and the next one stopped). He did not want to have the truck (typically parked in an alley for many small jobs) “advertising” that it was a service business and possibly “inviting” some police officer or other city official to ask questions about business licenses, etc. Later, however, he did have his business information painted on the side of the truck. I don’t know what caused him to change his opinion on this.

Around 1954 he bought a car, a Plymouth or a Dodge (red, I think). Later, he had a 1958 Dodge (red and black, with large tail fins and a push-button automatic transmission – I learned to drive with that car). Then probably a 1963 or 1964 Dodge (red, I believe). His last car was about a 1976 brown Dodge I sold that one as administrator of his estate. There may have been another one purchased in the late 1960s.

His business stationary listed his title as “Manager.” At times dealing with customers (face to face or over the phone), when he did not want to provide an on-the-spot estimate for a job, he would mention a non-existent “partner” who he claimed he needed to “consult with” before providing an (often written) price quote for a job.

Uncle Virgil (V. A. Fields) visited my dad in Detroit at some time in the 1950s, and perhaps stayed there for several weeks, going out on “air conditioning” cleaning jobs. Some time after he returned to Arizona, Uncle Virgil started a similar business of his own out there. He probably mostly ran it as a low-key part-time thing in conjunction with his service station (although he may have started the Arizona cleaning business before starting or buying the service station). I believe he used the same name as my dad’s initial business name: Ventilation Cleaning Service. [I vaguely recall there was a third “spin-off” like this too, where a former employee – perhaps Stanley, brother-in-law of Art Taylor, returned to some city in the south to do this -- started a similar business in some other city using the same name, while I was a small boy). I once asked my dad why he didn’t “claim” to be a larger company with these other “branches” (this was when I was maybe 9 or 10). His answer was something along the lines that he didn’t want to have any liability if these other businesses did something wrong (such as accidentally start a fire or be involved in an auto accident, I imagine).]

He had black accountant (who mostly seemed to be involved only at tax time). I don’t remember his name. He used a black woman named Miss Jolly (or perhaps Jolley) to do typing and other secretarial services. Both of these were basically “walk-in shop” businesses. Dad would go to them when he had need of them. They were not anything close to doing full time work for him. I seem to recall that Miss Jolly called herself a public stenographer (that was on the door of her office, which, I believe, was someplace near the intersection of East Forest or East Warren and John R). She got married when she was perhaps in her early 40s. I’m not sure if she continued to use the name Jolly after her marriage.

As I wrote above, some of his work dealt with cleaning the metal hoods or canopies in restaurant kitchens (the structures that sort of collect heat, smoke, vapor, and odors, and exhaust them out of the kitchen). Vapor from cooking oils tends to condense and collect on these, forming a grease-like substance, which can be a fire hazard. Grease accumulation is especially likely if one of the items under the hood is a deep fryer.

Perhaps in the late 1950s, Dad got the idea that it might be possible to capture (or collect or recover) some of the heat going through the hood (from air being exhausted from the building) and use it to heat the dining area of the restaurant during cold weather. In effect, his idea was to convert the exhaust hood into a heat exchanger, where horizontal tubes would go thru the exhaust hood. Air would be forced to flow through the tubes and enter the heating/ventilation system for the dining room. The kitchen exhaust air (with cooking odors and vapors in it) would not directly mix with the room ventilation (or “breathing) air.

Over some period of time (a couple years) he had a small model built and took it to a patent attorney. The attorney apparently told him that it wasn’t a patentable concept (I suspect because it was a heat exchanger, which had either already been patented or else was something like "obvious to one skilled in the art”). I seem to remember hearing the patent attorney also told Dad things like this had been tried before and that condensation in the tubes was a common problem with this kind of thing.

I had not been supportive of this “invention” thinking it was “too easy” and someone must have thought of it before (I was a know-it-all teenager). I think my attitude probably hurt him and I regret it now – I could have handled things much better (I’m ashamed of my behavior). Like him, I probably had no knowledge or understanding of tube-type heat exchangers at that time. All of my dad’s “design work” had been done with concepts and physical models. He had no understanding of any way to “model” what he wanted with calculations (involving flow rates, specific heat capacity of air, etc.). I might have had some very rudimentary knowledge of this as a teenager, but, if I did, it never occurred to me that math could be applied to his idea (and if it had occurred to me, I would not have had the ability to do it). Neither of us was “skilled in the art.”

I remember a few times old friends from his boyhood in Arkansas; the friends called him “Rufus.” That was apparently his nickname as a boy.

He told me that Uncle Lacy took a train to Detroit and stayed with him (and my mother, and me, I presume) and went to at least one game of the 1945 World Series. Dad said that prior to Uncle Lacy’s arrival, it had not occurred to him that tickets to the games would be available. I presume Uncle Lacy purchased a ticket from a scalper outside the ball park.

When I was perhaps 6 or 7, my female cousin Bennie Magness (later Bennie Cummings) made me a “sock doll” (made from a gray “work” sock), who somehow acquired the name Henry. Later, my dad and I were driving between Arkansas and Detroit (not sure which direction) and we stayed overnight at a motel. The next morning, we started out driving again. After some miles (I’m guessing after driving close to an hour), I realized that Henry had been left behind at the motel. Amazingly, my dad turned around and we drove back to “rescue” Henry. Later, when I was in my 20s or 30s, I would occasionally think of this. My reaction at that time was to be amazingly appreciative of my father’s love for me (and his patience at that time). I could not imagine that (if I had children), I would ever spend an extra (perhaps) 2 hours making a round-trip like to recover a sock doll. However, as I’ve become older (I’m writing this paragraph in early 2010, when I’m age 65), I think that perhaps if I had become a first-time father (especially later in my life, as he did – he was almost 41 when I was born), perhaps I would have done it. I also wonder if this incident may have reminded him of some disappointment in his childhood – one that he was trying to protect me from. (I used the word patience earlier in this paragraph. I’m not sure my father would have had this amount patience with me at certain times later in our lives.)

When I was a youngster (perhaps between ages 5 and 8), my favorite movie and TV cowboy has Hopalong Cassidy (played by actor William Boyd). My dad would tease me by pretending he could not pronounce “Cassidy,” pronouncing it various incorrect ways, such as “Cassissity.” Also, I remember once when we were on a streetcar on Woodward Avenue (I think) on the way to take me to a Roy Rogers movie, when we passed a theater where a Hopalong Cassidy movie was playing. I saw it and called it out – and he took me to that Hopalong Cassidy movie instead of the one we had planned to see. I suspect this was some time in 1949, after my mother died (but before I went to live in Arkansas). I couldn’t read then, but I guess I recognized the words “Hopalong Cassidy” – in other words, I could probably read Hoppy’s name before I could read my own last name.

Also when I was very young and sat in his lap, he used to tease me about how when I grew so that my legs were long enough to touch the ground (while sitting in his lap), I would no longer be able to sit there. I remember how my legs were then very far from the ground (while I was on his lap) and I couldn’t imagine that ever happening.

Similar to the “sitting on his lap thing,” I also remember a time when he took me on my first airplane ride. I believe this was between New York (perhaps from the Newark, New Jersey airport) and Detroit. I suspect I had stayed with my grandmother for a time after my mother died, and he had come to get me to take me back to Detroit some months later (perhaps late summer or early fall 1949). One thing I remember about this flight was that my dad (called “Daddy” in those days) seemed to me to be so tall that I could not envision how he could possibly be able to stand up inside the airplane fuselage. He did, of course. They used propeller planes in those days, of course. My memory is that we were in sort of a jump seat at the back of the plane – a single seat that faced the aisle, not one facing forward (actually, it faced another seat directly across from it that was also perpendicular to the other four-across seats on the plane). I believe I sat on his lap throughout most of the flight.

Another story from this time is something I don’t believe I remember, but he told me about it many years later. He said he and I had been downtown. He purchased something, and, as soon as he bought it, he realized that he did not have enough money left to pay the fare to ride back home on a streetcar or bus. He said he and I walked home, with him striking a deal with me: I would walk every other block and then the would carry me for the alternating every-other-block. At the time he first told me about this (that I remember, when I was perhaps 10 or 12) I assumed he was talking about walking from downtown Detroit to the apartment at 71 Garfield. Thinking about it now, I hope it wasn’t when he lived a the Clairmount/Woodward area, which would have been a much longer walk.

Some time in the early 1950s (or perhaps middle 1950s) he purchased a Zenith radio that had a white plastic case, which he used to listen to Detroit Tiger baseball game broadcasts – and perhaps occasionally to an on-the-hour news broadcast. He had this radio for probably at least 20 years. This was before the days of transistors, so the radio had vacuum tubes in it. It was a table-model radio (or, at least a shelf-model), perhaps roughly the size of a loaf of bread. It may be in the background of an old photo someplace.

Around 1960 (my memory of the time frame could be uncertain by as much as a few years on this) he began to develop benign tumors on the lymph glands on the sides of his neck. First one side expanded (and, after several months – perhaps a year or two) was surgically removed. Then a similar tumor developed on the gland on the other side. I think this one was also surgically removed after a few years (I’m a bit uncertain about this second surgery). I have a vague recollection the tumor or tumors may have come back after a few years after the surgery.

He also had at least two instances of cancer on his lower lip (likely related to his smoking). He had surgery for this in the 1960s, and (after I moved to Pennsylvania) a second surgery at some time. After the second surgery, he had trouble keeping liquid from slightly dribbling out of his mouth while drinking (this may have started after the first surgery). The surgery left sort of a notch in his lower lip. To me, this was not a greatly noticeable thing – at least not that I remember (that is, neither the effect on his appearance or the dribbling was greatly noticeable – not to me, anyhow). I suspect dad’s youngest brother who survived to adulthood, Uncle Lacy, apparently had a similar lower lip tumor that was surgically removed (this speculation is based on his appearance several years before his death). He too had been a smoker (although Lacy might have quit smoking late in his life, I’m not certain).

My cousin Bennie Magness Cummings and her family lived in Salado Arkansas, on what might be called a farmette (perhaps 4 acres surrounding their home, including an old barn -- and perhaps a couple smaller outbuildings – I believe they purchased this property around the mid-1950s). She had two sons, born in 1954 and around 1957. Some time in the early 1960s, after I left Arkansas to live in Detroit with my dad, he bought a pony for Bennie’s boys, since Bennie had an area where she could keep them (and two boys to enjoy the pony). The pony acquired the name of Trigger. That was probably a gift inspired by me, since it was something I would have dearly loved at the age Bennie's children were when dad bought it for them. Fortunately for all involved, I had outgrown my affection for cowboys and Roy Rogers at the time of the Trigger purchase, so I was not envious of them (that I remember). Officially, Trigger was owned by all of Aunt Ruby’s grandchildren. However, George Ann’s girls were seldom in Arkansas (their father was a career US Air Force officer). So they seldom saw “their” pony. For practical purposes, Trigger belonged to Bennie’s boys.

Around perhaps 1975 my dad and Edith were in an automobile accident (in Missouri, I think) where their car was totaled (they came back to Detroit by plane or train). My dad’s shoulder and chest were badly bruised – and I think his collarbone was fractured. My understanding was that the car was struck (bumped) on the left rear quarter panel by someone passing too closely (who did not stop) and dad’s car went out of control, jumped a guard rail, ran into a deep ditch (or depression) on the other side of the guard rail, and then came to a stop when the front hit the opposite side of the deep “ditch”. These were not, strictly speaking, life-threatening or permanently disabling injuries, but they took a lot out of my dad. He (and/or possibly Mom) thought he never fully recovered from this (i.e., never again had the same level of energy and alertness). I was told damage to the car was primarily to the front end from impacting the far side of the ditch. There was only a small amount of damage at the point of contact with the other car.

Dad grew up in the south at a time of strict racial segregation. He had difficulty accepting the changed times of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. On the other hand, he had a strong sense of fair play, and (in my memory) was never rude -- or even impolite -- to a person he met one-on-one. Politically, Dad was supportive of (and excited about) George Wallace’s campaigns for president in 1968 and 1972.

Dad’s business could provide him with a living even though there was a lot of idle time between jobs. A lot of his work seemed to be waiting for the phone to ring with a work order (or prospect – a request for him to provide an estimate for work). He was bored just sitting around, so he had several “hangout” places where he could be with other men. When he lived on Willis Avenue, one was a service station on the southwest corner of Canfield and Cass, owned for much of this time by a man named Ted. His hangouts are discussed further later in this endnote.

He loved to talk, he loved Arkansas, and he loved to talk about Arkansas. One of the jokes among the people working for him was that often (when they were working in a factory or office building at night) when they need to ask him something, they would find him talking about Arkansas to someone (such as a night watchman). And that sometimes seemed the case to me too.

I think he really loved his brothers – and his sister Aunt Ruby. He spent a great deal of time and effort visiting family – driving to Arkansas many times – and to Arizona a few times (the drove in part because Edith did not like to fly). Generally, they would stop and visit Edith’s daughters in Kentucky and/or Kansas on these trips (one daughter, Charlene, lived in both Tennessee, Kentucky, and Kansas, at different times). There may have also been at least one trip where they drove to Kansas, then Dad flew on alone to Arizona to visit his brothers for a couple weeks, while Edith stayed in Kansas with her daughters and grandsons.

With one exception, I do not recall that he ever took any kind of vacation (during my lifetime/memory), other than to visit family (although he might have stopped by a tourist place for a few hours on the way to visit family members). The one exception was that once when he was in Arizona visiting Uncle Virgil (I’m pretty sure this was after Uncle Orville died), he went to Las Vegas for a few days with a friend who then lived in Arizona (I think it was Wayne Holderby – who I believe had lived in Detroit for many years, if it was him; perhaps he retired to the Phoenix area). Dad had a great time on this trip (even though Dad did not gamble or drink). He talked about it for probably a year when I would visit him. He was especially impressed with the Circus-Circus casino, where trapeze artists were apparently performing in the casino itself, with customers playing slot machines directly below them – and largely ignoring the performers. Since he was already on a family visit/vacation in Arizona, this trip to Las Vegas was sort of a non-family vacation within a family vacation.

Most of his friends in Detroit were also southerners, and several of those were old friends from Arkansas. The area where he lived in Detroit during the last part of his life (which I thought was sometimes known as “the Cass Corridor” – however, I saw a web site indicating only the portion of this “corridor” north of Grand Boulevard [or possibly the portion north of the Edsel Ford Expressway] is not considered “the Cass Corridor”; in any event, the term “Cass” is a bit misleading, the area which really extended west from Cass to at least Third Street, and more likely to the John Lodge Expressway) was, for a time (probably in the 1950s and 1960s), more or less known as being the “ethnic neighborhood” for Appalachian or “hillbilly” people in Detroit. Later, but while he and Edith continued to live there, it became largely African American (and somewhat crime- and drug-infested).

I can remember that before I left to live in Arkansas (when I was living in a boarding house – someplace in northwest Detroit, I believe), he lived in a rented room on a second floor (on Woodward Avenue, I think, somewhere in the vicinity of Clairmount and Woodward this would have been around 1949 or 1950). Donna Fields sent me a shoebox full of miscellaneous papers around 2005. A couple of these give Ralph's (Dad's) 1950 address as 8648 Woodward Avenue, Detroit, Michigan, which I suspect is the address of this rented room. My memory is that most of the second floor was a lady’s apartment (dad’s landlady), but one room (where Dad lived) had a separate entrance off the hallway that ran alongside a staircase that came up from an entrance (to the second floor) from the street. One memory about this rented room is that the closet in his bedroom was also the entry way to the attic. Thus at one end of the closet were the bottom 2 or 3 stairs of a stairway that ended with a blocked-up wall, or perhaps a locked door of some type.

Another memory from this place is that I learned my dad's birthday was coming up told his landlady, who baked him a cake, so we had a party (just the three of us, I think). I THINK the number 45 was written on the icing of the cake (however, thinking about the timing -- it MIGHT have been 46, or perhaps should have been 46). Another (less proud) memory is that I had a pair of toy handcuffs at that time. Once, while my dad was sleeping, the lady was watching me and her boyfriend was there (that's the word I seem to remember from my dad). He let me put the handcuffs on him. Then I teased him by not showing him how to release them. He panicked (perhaps, in my memory, saying that he had to go to work). They woke up my dad to make me show them how to get the cuffs off. I MIGHT have thought (at first) that HE was teasing me, because the mechanism to release the handcuffs was (to me) so obvious, a clearly-visible (but not labeled) button on each cuff.

The area of Clairemount and Woodward may have been near a restaurant where dad once told me that (former heavyweight boxing champion) Jack Johnson used to occasionally be seen. Also, I THINK my dad may have had an answering service and mail drop for his business at this time (I'm not totally certain, this may be mixed up with a different memory). I know he worked nights and slept days during this time. Not sure if he worked a night shift and at a regular job and did his business part time during the day, or vice versa. But I think he had a regular job AND the business during some times around this period. The Clariemount and Woodward intersection is also within a few blocks of where dad and his first wife had lived during when they were recorded in the 1930 census (and where she continued to live into the mid-1930s, according to various Detroit city directories from that era). Since Dad did not have a kitchen in this tiny apartment (really just a rented room), he probably mostly ate in restaurants. This could be where he established (or cemented) the relationships with the two or three restaurant owners in the area (which are mentioned several paragraphs above).

When I spent the summer with him around 1952, he lived in a small apartment near the back (alley side) of 71 Garfield, Detroit – the same apartment building he had lived in with my mother. I believe this small apartment was on the third floor (or maybe the second floor – the “first” floor of the building was really sort of half a flight of stairs above the actual ground or grade level – and the floor of the basement apartments were really about ½ of a floor below grade level). It was smaller than the one we had lived in when my mother was alive.

Later, when a larger basement apartment became available in the 71 Garfield building, he moved there. Around 1954, after he married Edith, the apartment building was sold to a “colored” (African-American) owner and all of the white occupants were apparently asked to leave (or perhaps it was just “understood” that they would, once black residents started moving in). They lived in the building for a few months after the black occupants started moving in (and Mom always said some the women she met in the building, such as in the laundry room, were – perhaps surprisingly to her -- among the finest women she ever expected to meet). Ralph and Edith (Mom) married in May 1953.

[This paragraph is a bit of a diversion. It contains some additional (much more recent) information about the building at 71 Garfield. I was in Detroit around 2007 or 2008. I drove down to the “the old neighborhood.” The building at 71 Garfield was still there (although most of the others on that street have vanished). However, the building was boarded up and had chain link fencing around a portion of the grade level perimeter. It looked like it was about to be demolished. Later, I looked at that area via Google Earth – or the Microsoft-owned service that is similar. They had what was evidently a fairly recent photo of that area (taken from directly overhead, looking straight down, possibly from an artificial earth satellite). It showed essentially a hole in the roof, suggesting there had been a fire that directly affected perhaps 3 or 4 apartments on the uppermost floor. That roof opening enabled one to see “into” the building to obtain a rough idea of the layout of those apartments in the center of the building, which confirmed my memory of the layouts from long, long, ago. I was in Detroit again in late June and early July 2010. Again, I went past this building (I had been to the nearby Detroit Institute of Arts), expecting it to have been demolished. However, it appears to have been refurbished (or perhaps refurbishments are nearing completion). It did not appear to be occupied, but the exterior looked quite nice (and intact) and there was a sign out front soliciting rental customers. Given the odd real estate market in recent years, plus that political cronyism is, shall we say, not unknown in Detroit, who knows what the real story is in that redevelopment.]

At that point, probably spring or summer of 1954, they (Ralph and Edith) moved to an apartment on the second floor of 469 West Willis Avenue, Detroit. This was the building where they first met Carl and Edna Clark, who also lived in that building. I believe Buster and Lillie Westmoreland may have initially lived next door (the building to the west, although they were later, for at time, the caretakers of 469 West Willis). Around 1956, Mom (Edith) and Dad moved to a somewhat larger (two-bedroom) first-floor apartment at 500 West Willis, where they lived the remainder of Dad’s life (500 W. Willis was like 71 Garfield in that the first floor was really more like a 1.5 floor, you had to go up a ½ flight of stairs to reach that first floor -- 469 W. Willis was similar). Willis is about 4 blocks south of Garfield. Woodward Avenue is the dividing line between East and West in Detroit, with regard to street names. The building at 71 Garfield is about ½ block east of Woodward (my memory is that there is not a “West Garfield” – and the word “East is not part of Garfield’s street name, even though it is east of Woodward Avenue – there used to be a relatively large auditorium-type building that occupied the space where West Garfield would have been; I think they used to have boxing matches in that building, which might have been called something like the Graystone Ballroom). The building at 500 West Willis is about 2 blocks west of Woodward. The street numbering in that part of West Willis Avenue is odd, with numbers up to “500” being used in only a two-block-long area instead of the 100-numbers-per-block numbering system that is more common in Detroit.

I’m pretty sure it was during the time they lived at 469 West Willis that Dad bought the grey metal desk, which, in effect, served as the business’s “office” during the rest of the time he ran the business (at least, it was the central piece of furniture of the portion of a room that served as the office). As a child, I was, at first, fascinated by this desk because it had a small combination-lock safe built into it. Dad soon disabled the combination lock. He was concerned that someone might learn he had a safe and assume he kept money or other valuables in it, thus increasing the possibility the home would be broken into and robbed.

When the G. M. Fields estate was settled (with property auctioned) around 1967, he purchased the estate’s interest in the two-story building on the northeast corner of Front Street and Locust Street in Newark (Locust Street is also State Highway 122 at that location). The estate’s interest was the lower floor. The upper floor was then occupied by the Masonic Lodge. The lower floor consisted of two “storefronts,” which were rented out – one to someone who ran a pool hall and the other Nicholas appliance store, who used it for storage. I sold this building in the early 1980s, while acting as his estate’s administrator. The building burned around the year 2000.

I don’t think Dad had ever owned any property (real estate) before (except for part-ownership of the real estate he had inherited from his dad and from Jeanette). He had what he called an “abstract deed” made up for the Newark building – a deed that traced ownership of the building from when the land was obtained from the federal government (by a “land grant” sale, around 1820, if I recall correctly) through all of the owners who had it up to him. I gave this over when I sold the building (which – I now suspect – was not necessary, since I don’t think it was the actual deed to the property). I wish I had retained at least a copy of it. He also had an architect make up a concept drawing for putting two apartments in the lower portion of the building (the only part he owned). I do not remember ever seeing the type of drawing for this that could have been used for construction (with, for example, studs, joists, plumbing, and wiring shown on the drawing, that’s why I used the term concept drawing).

He sold his business around 1973, getting very little for it. I suspect reasons for this was that it was so small, he had (at that time) no full time employees, and he had always run it was a sole proprietorship, with basically the businesses financial records being essentially one and the same with his personal tax records (i.e., there were no audited financial records that could be provided to a prospective buyer to accurately estimate the value the business -- and to use to go to a bank to obtain a loan -- although, by the time of the sale, when he had been in semi-retirement for a few years, the best-case "true" value was probably much lower than it had been a few years earlier).

The last several years of Dad’s life, he and Mom (Edith) spent quite a bit of time in their chairs in the two south corners of their living room – him in the southeast corner and her in the southwest corner (some of that time waiting for the phone to ring, before Dad basically shut down – and then sold – his business). The view out the window included the intersection of Willis Avenue and Second Avenue.

He was at my college graduation in 1967 and also my wedding to Donna in 1971. Two memories I have of the wedding are him going with me to the Pittsburgh airport to pick up my sister who flew in from California (the first time he had seen her in perhaps 9 or 10 years) and also him with tears in his eyes as we greeted him, as friends and family members came thru the reception line in the foyer of the church following the ceremony (somewhere there is a videotape recording of people going thru this reception line, taken by Rosie Wilczynski).

Dad was a social person – not spending large amounts of time reading (except newspapers) or watching television (except the news – although he did like the George Pirot documentaries that used to be on local Detroit TV – in the 1950s, I believe – although, now that I think about it more, he did have some favorite TV shows). He was, in a way, fortunate, that his business was successful enough for him to earn a living without having to work extremely long hours. Also, the business was seasonal, in a sense (the air conditioning part), which allowed vacations, such as the trips to Arizona, although it also constrained vacations to always be during winter. Also, much of his work had to be done at nights and weekends, so the cleaning activities would not interfere with operations at the businesses he was working with (some larger jobs at auto factories were done at something like model changeover times). In addition, he did not own a home, which would have required chores and maintenance/repair projects. Thus, he had a considerable about of “free time,” especially during daytime. This was probably both a blessing and a curse.

As I indicated earlier, he would go and basically “loaf” with friends, mostly to socialize and to have something to do. Early in my life, he would spend time at Charles Tyner’s Highland Park (or near Highland Park) service station. Later (after Tyner retired and then “unretired,” operating a service station much farther away in a northern Detroit suburb), he went to a service station at the southwest corner of Cass and Canfield (owned by a man named Ted, but Dad was friends with all of the employees there too). One of the workers at this station, Jim Partin, I THINK his name was) lived in the 500 West Willis apartment building for a time. Jim later had stations of his own, one after the other (Shell Oil branded) on Cass and later on Grand River, both in the general vicinity of Cass Tech High School, if I remember correctly. These became hangouts too. Dad would also “hang out” at a used car lot owned by Arkansas friend Fred Whisnant at time, but it was a much greater distance away on the east side of Detroit (Fred may have had used car dealerships at two or three different locations over the years – also, my memory is that he had worked at a Chevrolet dealership for a time; I believe the 1954 flatbed truck was purchased at a dealership where Fred worked – I remember this truck purchase, in part, because this was where I first saw a Corvette, the classic first one, with the wire mesh over the headlights).

Thinking about it now (in 2010), I wonder if perhaps this “workplace socialization” (someone else’s workplace, since Dad always essentially ran his business from his home) was a substitute for the many years he said he “hung out” at bars when he was a drinker.

I mentioned the TV documentaries above. He generally watched the 6 pm TV news, and he generally tuned in early, so as to not miss anything. This led to him often watching most or all of the program that came on before the news (or immediately after it). My recollection is that these were often syndicated re-runs. I seem to remember the old 30-minute Gene Autry TV show once has this time slot. I also remember the “Dobie Gillis” show in this context, which, perhaps oddly, he enjoyed a lot (perhaps because of the highly experienced TV actors in several roles, such as “Dobie’s” parents).

Later, near the end of his life, he watched “Dallas,” which came on Friday nights. When I would drive to Detroit to visit him on weekends, I would sometimes leave after work. arriving in Detroit just after “Dallas” had gone off (and be treated to a discussion of what “J. R.” had done that night) – or perhaps I would arrive in time to see the last few minutes of the program. At that time, I had not yet become hooked on “Dallas” myself, so I had only a vague idea of who “J. R.” was.

In some ways he lacked confidence in areas he felt he did not understand. When I was in high school in Detroit, I had opportunities to apply for several scholarships. However, most of these required filing family financial disclosure forms, which were keyed toward expected income during my freshman year in college, not income for previous years. He refused to submit a form containing income projections, since (being self-employed, and not having any firm, long-term contracts with customers) he did not have a steady year-to-year income. He was concerned that projecting future income would somehow cause tax problems, if his actual income differed from a projection. (I did not understand or do not remember the details of his concerns – and they may have just been generalized concerns about stuff he did not fully understand, rather than some specific issue.) This was a very troublesome thing for me, since I felt that having significant scholarship “income” would give me some much-desired independence. It was a troubling conflict between him and me.

His tastes in food were simple. One restaurant he liked (on Detroit’s east side) was “Hoss’s Roast Beef” – sort of a roast beef buffet place – more pot roast than prime rib, if I recall correctly – and very good if I recall correctly (perhaps more a cafeteria than a buffet, since you could only go through the line once). This particular restaurant was also a customer of his business. He patronized only a few restaurants that had been customers. Some of this selectivity was based on price or atmosphere (he probably would not have felt comfortable at an extremely fancy restaurant – although he usually dressed in a suit and tie to go to Hoss’s on Sundays). However, another factor is that, due to his work, he had some idea of the cleanliness and organization of a customer restaurant’s kitchen – as well as the personality and character of the management.

At home, he liked bananas in the morning. He and Edith had some odd-shaped saucers, which were rather deep (more bowl-shaped than regular saucers -- or maybe they were small dessert dishes or bowls that they used as saucers). He would tend to pour his morning coffee into his “saucer” and drink the coffee from the saucer, rather than from the cup. He also enjoyed Edith’s “traditional” (in my memory) Sunday noontime meal of pressure-cooked roast beef (a chuck roast) with a chocolate cake for dessert.

I also mentioned Cass Tech above. That was where I went to school, once I finally moved to Detroit. He often drove me to school on cold, dark winter mornings. Again, probably more an expression of love for me and pride in me, than something that really needed to be done.

He was about 5 feet 10 inches tall (perhaps 5 ft 9 and ¾ inches – I remember one time when he and I carefully measured one another’s heights – or maybe Edith did it for us). Much of my childhood, I believe his weight was in the 150s, tending up toward the low-to-mid-160s and low 170s as he aged into his mid-60s and then into his 70s.

He usually wore a hat (Fedora type) outdoors, always tilted down toward the right side of his head. I believe his brothers (three of whom I knew) wore their hats the same way. I think there is a photo of the oldest brother, Clarence (who died in 1925), wearing his hat this same way. I wonder if they all tried to copy that oldest brother.

Once, when I had recently purchased shoes of size 7 and ½, he told me his shoe size was also 7 and ½ at the time he first came to Detroit (around 1929, I believe) but his shoe size was then – at the time of our conversation (some time in the 1960s, probably) -- size 9. He attributed standing on hard factory floors for many years as having caused his feet to “grow” (spread out).

At times he enjoyed dressing up, wearing suits and ties. Looking back, I suspect this was, in part, because of his pride in being a businessman (like his father, perhaps), no longer a factory worker (which he had been for so many years).

At times (but in my experience, somewhat rare times) he could express a gentle, perhaps almost whimsical nature. I remember once a fly was buzzing around, annoying me (and probably him). He said something about how energetic and persistent the fly was – almost giving it a personality. After that, the fly’s actions didn’t annoy me quite so much. I know this last thing probably sounds a bit odd. However, this whimsical gentleness is an experience (and a feature of his personality) that I can’t describe very well.

Of course, to me, the thing about him that most affected me (and that, all too late, I’m now most appreciative of) is how devoted to me that he was. I once received a letter from my Aunt Ruby, where she said that he “lived for me” – and that’s probably pretty accurate. Now that I’m older (and I have no children myself), I suspect this came, in part, from (1) him having become first become a father rather late in his life (almost age 41) and (2) having had a second child and (in effect, through a most unfortunate combination of circumstances) having “lost” her.

He had false teeth during all of his life that I remember. He once told me he lost his teeth to periodontology – not to simple tooth decay (cavities).

Dad was a smoker the whole time I knew him – and probably all of the last 62 or 63 years of his life; he died at age 76. I can remember time when he would be awake around 4 AM smoking a cigarette. The brand he smoked for much of the portion of his life within my memory was Pall Mall (unfiltered).

My dad was hospitalized briefly around January 1980. He was soon diagnosed with lung cancer (small cell carcinoma, I believe). I believe he had been coughing up blood, which is what led to him being hospitalized for the tests that revealed the cancer. My recollection is that he was at first treated with radiation and then with chemotherapy – this second thing caused him to lose his hair. I visited about every second week up until his death in July 1980. My memories of this roughly-six-month period (between when he was diagnosed with lung cancer and when he died) are pretty jumbled.

I had been to visit in July, the weekend prior to his death, driving to Detroit from my home in the Pittsburgh area. I was about to go home on a Sunday, when he had severe shortness of breath that Sunday. We called an ambulance, but, when it came, the driver and attendant said the only thing they were authorized to do was to take him to Receiving Hospital (owned by the city of Detroit, I think). He wanted to go to Henry Ford Hospital, when he had been treated with the chemotherapy. We took him to the emergency room there. They put him on oxygen and, after a very long day there, they admitted him for treatment for pneumonia. I visited him the next day, Monday. At that time he seemed to be stabilized, so I drove back to Pittsburgh late that day. However, I was awakened during the night (or perhaps early the next morning) by a phone call with the news that he had gone into a coma.

I flew to Detroit at that point and took a cab to Ford Hospital (may have left my luggage checked in a locker at the airport, or maybe I stopped at the apartment before going to the hospital – my memory is fuzzy almost 30 years later). Mom was staying at the hospital.

I think it was on the Monday after he entered the hospital for the final time, before he went into a coma, when I was visiting when they came in to sort of pump some kind of fluid out of his lungs. I left the room and went to a lounge area at the end of the corridor. However, his door must have been left open and the treatment was evidently very, very, painful, I could hear him crying out. I think they put some kind of tube into his lungs through his nose, down into his lungs. I seem to recall him later saying something about how he wished I had left, rather than having me hear him cry out in pain like that. The hospital people left the machine in his room. Some terrible looking fluid that had been drawn out of his lungs was visible in a reservoir in the bottom of the machine. The next day, he was much deeper into the coma, and never really came out of it. It seemed that after he went into a coma, they used this machine less and less frequently.

He seemed to sort of come out of the coma just a bit after a day or so, but would try to remove the mask over his lower face that was providing oxygen. At that point, they restrained his arms, essentially tying them to the rails on the side of his bed. For a time, he was in a light enough coma that he would occasionally moan about this. In hindsight, I have trouble thinking that I let this happen during the last week of his life – his last memories must have been terrible (and probably terrifying).

The hospital floor where he spent the last week of his life was very depressing (and would have been, even if it had not been my dad who was dying). It seemed to be a floor where the treatment was sort of one level less than intensive care. And it also seemed to be a floor where most of the patients were men dying of lung cancer.

After he died, we had a visitation at a funeral home near where he lived in Detroit. Then we flew his body to Arkansas, where it was buried near his parents (and his stepmother, his brother Alvin, and his sister Della -- or perhaps Dilla).

A few weeks after he died, when I was administrator of his estate, Mom (Edith) received a phone bill from Ford Hospital for about $500 (insurance – including, I guess, Medicare) had picked up about $7500 of his stay for that final week of his life. My thought was that insurance coverage for over 90% of the bill was pretty good, but Mom thought they should have covered more. She and I went down to the hospital (with me thinking it was just to humor her). When we got there, the lady looked at the papers we had and said that yes, they had made a billing error. We really owed only something like $19 (for a phone in his room, I think). Mom was a lot smarter than I was.

One of my goals (as this is written in March 2012) is to someday go to Arkansas with enough time to spend doing several days of research – to do things such as skimming over ALL of the issues of The Newark Journal newspaper and looking at records of the Independence County courthouse. Hopefully, the newspaper will enable me to fill in several additional details concerning Ralph Fields, G. M. Fields, and others. I believe the Arkansas State History Commission reading room had 11 rolls of microfilm of back issues of The Newark Journal. I was in that “history center: around the year 2000, but, at that time, had only time to spend perhaps a ½ day there. The Independence County courthouse should have details on several land transactions involving G. M. Fields (and also the Ralph Fields and Alice McNairy divorce – although I suspect the divorce records will be only something like a one-page court order, not something with any real details).

In the above I have tried to exclude certain information about my sister (who is alive and well), to protect her privacy. This excluded information should still exist in the version of this in my database. However, if I have done things correctly, it will be excluded from public versions.
[S668] 1940 U. S. Census, Perth Amboy, Middlesex County, New Jersey, population schedule, Enumeration District 12-106, page 61A, Line 1, Household 1 (visited 21 April 1940), Nathan Golosoff -- informant was Jeanette Golosoff, a daughter; digital image, National Archives 1940 Census, Official 1940 Census Website (http://1940census.archives.gov : accessed by Carl Fields 3 April 2012), citing National Archives microfilm publication T627, roll 2361, image 493. Family was skipped in regular enumeration; this family is on the first page of the re-visits by the enumerator. Family surname seems to have been recorded as Golosoh.
[S670] Carl Fields, "Personal Recollections about Edith Mae Cantrell by Carl Fields."
[S673] State of Michigan, pharmacy license, Jennette Golosoff Fields, License No. 15306, issued 6 June 1944; original, family copy, Miscellaneous Fields/Golosoff Family Papers; privately held by Carl Field, Aiken South Carolina, document held as of June 2012. This is a large format document on stiff cardboard, something that would be used (probably framed) in a pharmacy where she worked (the copy is not in a frame in 2012). Document is (unfortunately) in damaged condition (water damage, due to poor decision by Carl to store it in a garage in the late 1980s).
[S685] 1940 U. S. Census, Newark, Independence County, Arkansas, population schedule, Enumeration District 32-3, page 9A, Line 19, Household 188 (visited 10 April 1940), Sallie Fields -- informant was Sallie Fields; digital image, National Archives 1940 Census, Official 1940 Census Website (http://1940census.archives.gov : accessed by Carl Fields June 2012), citing National Archives microfilm publication T627, roll 143, image 62.
[S687] 1940 U. S. Census, Big Bottom Township, Independence County, Arkansas, population schedule, Enumeration District 32-4, page 2B, Line 54, Household 35 (visited 27 April 1940), Charles Prince -- informant was not indicated; digital image, National Archives 1940 Census, Official 1940 Census Website (http://1940census.archives.gov : accessed by Carl Fields June 2012), citing National Archives microfilm publication T627, roll 143, image 71.
[S861] This conclusion is based on Boolean searches of the 1920 census information on the Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org web sites and page-image by page-image searches for the portion of these data bases covering Perth Amboy, New Jersey.
[S916] Jeannette M. Decker, Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, to Carl Fields, e-mail, "Request for Information on a Long-Ago Graduate" (providing pharmacy college graduation date for Jeannette Golosoff), 9 June 2006; , Computer Files (e-mails, Genealogy, or "Gene," section of Local Folders).
[S932] Carl Fields, "Personal Recollections about Jeanette Golosoff" :

I remember very little about my mother (who died just after I turned 4 years old). One thing I do remember is one occasion where she built sort of a tent in the living room in the apartment at 71 Garfield Ave by spreading something like a bedspread over chairs (and possibly something like a card table). She had a vaporizer that made a steamy atmosphere under the “tent”. She and I sat on the floor under the “tent”. I believe my dad later told me she did this as a treatment (or palliative) for asthma.

Another early memory, which only indirectly involves her, is the first time I “escaped” from my playpen (also in that same room at 71 Garfield). I had put my foot out of the playpen, onto the floor. With my foot, I pushed the playpen (which was on casters) over until one side of it was against the couch. Then I used the base of the couch (the surface under the seat cushions) and then the top of the cushions as sort of a ladder, to climb over the “fence wall” of the playpen, tumbling over this “wall” onto the top of the couch cushions (I put my foot between the vertical slats forming the wooden playpen to reach the couch). Then I got off the couch and walked over to the kitchen door, where both of my parents were. From this point, I remember one bit of conversation, but I can’t quite remember what either of them looked like (i.e., my memory has no “picture” of them in that kitchen – a “mental picture” I would dearly like to have) . The words I remember were that my dad said there was no need to ever put me in the playpen again, since now that I had gotten out of it once; I could do it any time. I remember this was a bit of a surprise to me. My main goal had not been to escape from the playpen (I don’t remember any feeling of being frustrated by being confined). It was more that I was proud of the step-by-step problem-solving process I had devised to get out this first time. I didn’t think of it as having found a method that I could use regularly. (I also have a vague memory there was an expandable gate-type apparatus that was sometimes used to keep me from entering the kitchen. It was made from a diagonal array of wooden slats (each similar in thickness to the wooden “bars” of the playpens of that era.)

Another memory I have from that apartment at 71 Garfield was that we had a record player. The only records I remember were: “The Arkansas Traveler” and “Pop Goes the Weasel”. However, I also have a vague memory that we had some kind of novelty song by Jerry Colonna (perhaps it was him who sang the weasel song). I wonder if this was the same record player that my sisterlater had, when she was around age six.

I also have a vague recollection of when she was in the hospital when my sister was born. I sort of remember her going to the car (we were at 272 Market Street in Perth Amboy). It may have been at that point they told me that when she came back I would have a little sister or brother. There may have been a separate memory that one of my aunt (coming back from visiting her in the hospital) told me there was a little baby in the room with my mother, but she didn’t tell me where the baby had come from, or why it just happened to be in the room with my mother (I’m not certain these are two memories of two separate occasions – it might be one incident that got into my memory is two slightly different forms – it’s all very hazy).
[S986] Michigan Department of Health, death certificate, numbers on certificate are 7710 and 0158907B (space marked for state file number is blank) (21 Jul 1980), Ralph Fields; Bureau of Vital Statistics and Registration, Trenton.
[S1030] Edith Cantrell Prince Fields Cemetery Marker, Blue Springs Cemetery, Newark, Independence County, Arkansas; Carl Fields, read July 2000 (and on other dates).
[S1269] "Jeanette Fields," Perth Amboy Evening News, 14 Jan 1949, page 3.

This is one of several articles accessed by Carl Fields via microfilm at the Perth Amboy New Jersey public library on 30 Aug 2011. Most (but not all) of these articles were obituaries or death notices. Digital photographs were taken off the microfilm viewer viewscreen. In a few instances, Carl neglected to record the page number of the issue of the newspaper where the article appeared (or else the page number is uncertain for other reasons). In some cases, obituaries and death notices may have been confused with one another. In a few instances, the same issue of the newspaper contained both a death notice and an obituary (usually on the same page). The name of the newspaper changed a few times starting in the 1960s, apparently due to reorganizations and mergers. The dates in these citations refer to when the news article appeared, which was almost always at least a day after the event described in the article took place.
[S1349] "Arkansas Divorce Index, 1923-1939 ," database Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : 20 July 2014), Alice and Ralph Fields, Decree: 17 Nov 1934 (filed 25 Oct 1934), Independence County, Docket 220, Certificate 1624, Volume 9; based on "Arkansas Divorce Index, 1923-1939," microfiche, Arkansas Genealogical Society. Index to divorces filed in US state of Arkansas from 1923-27 and 1934-39.
[S1478] Independence County, Arkansas, Probate Records, records for estate of George M. Fields (died intestate 7 Apr 1937), Admin Box 132, County Clerk.

This file was examined (and digitally photographed) by Carl Fields on 12 June, 2015. Although the index of estate records was in the office of the County Clerk in the court house in Batesville (the county seat), the actual records were in the Old Independence Regional Museum in Batesville. Ralph Fields (a son of George M Fields) was the administrator of the estate.

The "box" was a somewhat-larger-than-letter-size envelope made of thick paper (or thin cardboard). Several loose documents related to the estate were in the envelope, along with a smaller envelope that held vouchers. All of the documents seem to be from 1937 and 1938.

Additional notes and observations by Carl Fields (20 June 2015):

1. In the land inventory (for the "Non-Rutherford" land entries), the first three items seems to comprise what the family referred to as "The Pink House Place". Lacy Fields lived on this place for a time. An unoccupied house existed on this land in the 1950s. At that time, any "pink" paint it may have once had completely vanished. The next three items appear to be land on Padgett Island, some of it between Big Bottom Slough and the White River. The final item in the "Non-Rutherford" list might be the 50% interest (shared with the Masonic Lodge) in the land under the "store" buildings at the east end (the northeast corner) of Front Street in Newark (Carl's memory is that this building burned around 2005 or 2006). The 5-acre and 9.06-acre parcels might be what the family referred to as the "Old Home Place" and "The Gibson Place," both on the east side of Long Street in Newark. The one-acre parcel might be the land west of Newark (on what was then Arkansas Highway 69). This was apparently where the family lived at the time of the 1910 census. The parcel called Lot 21 in Block 1 of S Division in Newark, might be the land under the building that had been the Newark Lumber Company (which Carl sort of remembers as the Cecil Norris "hardware" store during his childhood in the 1950s). The "1/4" in the description might refers to the family's fractional ownership in that parcel, although Carl had thought the family had a 1/3 ownership interest in the building (and, he had presumed, also the land under the building).

2. The Rutherford Land is a mystery to Carl. There seemed to be one document among the vouchers for a commission for sale of the Rutherford land (despite what is written in the narrative about the problems in selling land where a surviving spouse has a life estate interest). If Carl understood the meaning of that voucher (and it it is included in the "Final Settlement") it is not clearly identified there.

3. The "Final Settlement" is primarily concerned with personal property. Carl's memory is that the land was not sold until around 1967 (except possibly for the mysterious "Rutherford Land"), which was the true "Final Settlement". Carl's memory is that one reason for the delay (after the death of Sallie Fields, the widow of G. M. Fields) was in obtaining agreement from the five children of Clarence Fields (who were widely scattered in the Western US). Their individual monetary interest in the estate was only 1/5 of that of the direct heirs, and some of them probably did not need the money as much as their aunt and uncles. At some future trip to Arkansas, Carl will go to the indices of real estate transactions in the county courthouse and try to track down the sales of the various land parcels in the 1967 era (and also the presumed sale of the mysterious :Rutherford land").

4. It is unclear (to Carl) from the "Final Settlement" how much each heir was entitled to. The various "advances" to some individuals complicate trying to understand this division.

5. The "Final Settlement" includes a "set apart" to Lacy and W. O. Fields. This seems to be that they took part of their interest in the estate in the form of taking over some or all of the farm implements. They are both listed as farmers in that area in the 1940 census.

6. The inventory of personal property does not include items such as clothing, furniture, household goods (items such as pots and pans, bedding, etc.). These apparently went to his widow as part of her personal property homestead allowance. She also took the car and two of the larger notes toward her dower allowance.

7. The items in the estate file indicate the probate court gave permission to sell the shares in the Gin Company and in the bank. However, it is not clear what happened to the bank shares. Carl recalls seeing a newspaper clipping from some time in the 1940s indicating that Sallie Fields was on the board of directors of the bank. This suggests that she may have retained some shares (or the family and/or estate retained the shares and she represented them on the board). The document in the estate file concerning the value of the bank shares is rather confusing. At some point in the 1940s, the bank (First National Bank of Newark) was sold, and it was, in effect, moved to Batesville. The bank that existed in Newark when Carl was a boy (called Bank of Newark) was a separate company founded after that earlier bank "moved" to Batesville.

8. The estate file appears to contain original signatures of Sallie Fields, Orval Fields, V. A. Fields, Lacy Fields, and Ralph Fields.

Carl did find a document on the internet that contains interesting background information (http://law.uark.edu/faculty/buehler/2012Spring/… : accessed 20 June 2015) giving information about Arkansas inheritance was as it (apparently) existed in 2012. However it is unclear how closely this corresponds to the situation in 1937. In particular, the dollar limits on personal property and sustenance allowances were probably lower in 1937 than the corresponding values given in the 2012 document (assuming the basic form of the law in 1937 was similar to the law in 2012. This 2012 internet document appears to be a handout for a course taught at the law school of the University of Arkansas.
[S1500] Probably "Happenings of Local Interest, Mostly About People," or a similar section on local news items, Newark (Arkansas) Journal, 28 Dec 1922, (Volume 22, Number 37); microfilm, Independence County Library.

Microfilm images from issues published between approximately mid-1922 to mid-1923 were examined by Carl Fields at the Independence County library around June 13, 2015. Items relating to individuals and families covered in this database were photographed. The reason Carl was examining these particular issues was that they included issues from 1923. Carl was interested in finding an obituary for Alma Childress (whose married surname was Craig). He knew (from a grave marker) that she died in 1923, but probably did not previously know her actual date of death. Digital images (from photographs) are retained in Carl Fields electronic/digital files (TMG Version 9.05 Exhibits Folder). As this is written (24 Aug 2015), Carl hopes to return to the Independence County Library some future time to examine microfilm images of additional issues of this newspaper.
[S1564] "U.S. City Directories, 1822-1995," database with images, Ancestry.com (http://ancestry.com. The Ancestry.com database was "published" at Provo UT, USA, by Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., in 2011. The citation indicates the database is a collection of directories for U.S. cities and counties in various years. Once the page image containing a name (or other entry) of interest is identified, one genarally has to "page" toward the earlier images in the volume in order to find a specific citation for the name of the volume (on the image of a title page. The image of each individual page (as well as the Ancestry index) will generally give some information about the city a year. The Ancestry indexes were apparently generally made from Optical Character Recognition (OCR), so some errors are present. Also, it is often difficult to locate a corporate or business listing -- or, in some cases, to recognize if a listing of a professional or craftsperson (such as a dressmaker) is a business address of a home address (or both). In addition, sometimes the leadiing digit of a street address number is lost in the OCR index process, especially it is a "1."
[S1673] "History of Lambda Kappa Sigma, Adapted from The Golden History Book," Blue & Gold Triangle (Lamda Kamma Sigma Newsletter,, Spring 2012, page 6. Lambda Kappa Sigma is a sorority for women in the profession of pharmacy. The Golden History Book is apparently a privately printed volume published as a resource distributed to each chapter. This article notes that the "Pi Chapter" was "installed" at Rutgers University" on May 9, 1930 and that Jeanette Golosoff was the chapter's vice president at that time. Digital copy of the article is archived at: http://www.lks.org/clientuploads/LKS_Periodicals/….
[S1902] 1910 US Census, Arkansas, Newark (Town), Big Bottom Township (ED 26), Independence County, 12A, Dwelling 206 Household 216, George W Fields; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed by Carl Fields 8 April 2020) , based on NARA Microfilm Publication T624 (Roll 52 of 1178, ED 26, FHL Film No. 1374065).

Travels in an Undiscovered Country

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