Things My Mom Lost

Growing Up with a Preacher Man

Rev. William "Lester" Howard (1929-2021)
Mary Eulalie McLean Howard (1933-2021)

Things My Mom Lost
____________________

by Carolyn Ann Howard

We all lose things. 

Yesterday at church, at the noon service for Maundy Thursday, I wanted to look nice. I put on my diamond earrings that my husband gave me, my circle heart necklace, and my wedding rings. My skin is so sensitive, I can only wear my wedding rings sparingly, unfortunately. Then, I saw Mom's tennis bracelet that I got from her after she died. I saw it, put it on, and went to church. Funny, too, I kept looking at it kept thinking how neat it was to be wearing a part of my mom at the service.

After church, I had a post-op appointment with the surgeon and then home. Once home, I went to the bathroom to get ready for bed, since I was done for the day, and I love my PJs! I took the necklace off, the rings, the earrings - ouchy wouchy - even really good earrings make my ears red after a little while. And then, the bracelet. But the bracelet wasn't there. I looked in the closet where I keep my jewelry. Not there. I went outside to look in my Jeep Compass. Not there. I called the church. Not there. I called the surgeon's office. Not there. The bracelet was gone; I had lost it. And then I thought, well... that figures.

Growing up, I was always losing things that belonged to Mom. In 7th grade, my mom finally let me get my ears pierced. After, I asked Mom if I could wear her beautiful earrings to school and, totally unlike her, she said yes. I promised her I would take good care of them, and that I wouldn't lose them. You guessed it. I lost them. In hindsight, I wish she would've said that I should just wear them to church and then take them off afterward. And that's what I should've done yesterday. But I forgot about the bracelet after our beautiful Maundy Thursday service was over.

When I was in 2nd grade at Woodlawn Elementary in Monticello, Indiana, I wore one of my mom's gorgeous scarves to school.  It was a particularly windy day, and Betty Maxwell and I were together on the playground, using our scarves as kites. The wind hit my mom's scarf just right, and it went soaring away. I mean, it flew away like it was fleeing the doomsday machine.

Mom lost her childhood home to the 1937 flood of the Ohio River in Scuffletown, Kentucky. Her Uncle John Pfingston was her rescuer that night. Thank God for Uncle John Pfingston. He saved everyone who lived in Scuffletown using his ferry.  After that, mom moved with her family just across the river to rural Newburgh, Indiana, close to Cypress Beach and Vanada Station. Click on photos to enlarge

Uncle John Pfingston's Ferry
Around 1937
Carolyn Ann Howard Family Collection

She went to high school at Yankeetown, and then her school burned down, so she lost that, because they didn't rebuild. After the fire, they bussed the Yankeetown kids to Pioneer School in Boonville, Indiana. Mom never got over her school burning down. Even after dementia began to set in, she would often tell the story of her school burning down.

Mom's Senior Photo
1951, Boonville, IN
Carolyn Ann Howard Family Collection

After Mom married Dad, she lost her name. She loved her name, Mary McLean. She hated being Mary Howard. Today women just hang onto their maiden name if they want. Not so in the 1950s, especially in the religious family she married into. Mom's brother had married Mary Lott, who became Mary McLean. Mom always resented this, feeling as if her sister-in-law had somehow stolen her name.

Mom (L) with her brothers and sister
Carolyn Ann Howard Family Collection

In 1963, I moved with my family to Monticello, Indiana, where we would live until 1977. We built quite a life at Monticello. My mother was the director of the highly reputable Monticello Day Care Center. Fourteen years later, my father got this itch to move to Evansville. An opening came up at a church, and he jumped at the chance, moving us to Evansville. Mom lost everything. She lost her friends, her job, her high station in life, her big house. She lost it all. Once to Evansville, she pivoted and became a successful artist, but she never recovered from the move, often speaking of Monticello with tears in her eyes.

Mom in her art studio about 1995
Taken by Ruth Kretchmar (1927-2011)
Carolyn Ann Howard Family Collection

Once her granddaughter was born, my mom soon began to teach her to sew. Together, they sewed a beautiful blanket. My mother loved that blanket, so Stephanie gave it to her. When Mom started talking about wanting to die somewhere around 2002, it got her into trouble. She also couldn't stop talking about the miscarriage she had in or around 1958. She would literally weep over this baby. She also couldn't stop talking about a family member who had been Catholic, who had married into the McLean family, and the McLean family shunned her for her Catholicism - I believe it might have been her paternal grandmother. My mother ended up in a mental ward at a hospital, and my father let her take the blanket that she and Stephanie had made together. You know the rest of the story. She lost the blanket. She came out of the mental ward, after shock treatment, not talking about her miscarriage or her family member. She was so angry about the blanket. She demanded that Stephanie make her a new one. And I told her, "Mom, I don't think she can, because I don't think she knows how to by herself."

And lastly, in the nursing home, just a few years before she died, my dad became obsessed with Mom wearing her wedding rings. Mom had lost so much weight, her rings didn't fit anymore. So Dad hired a jeweler from Boonville to come into the nursing home and measure her finger. Then the jeweler took the rings and resized them and cleaned them. Dad was so happy that Mom was going to wear her rings again, even though I warned him time and again that this was not a good idea. Dad rarely listened to me. He was hell bent on her wearing her wedding rings. She didn't wear them for very long until they were gone. We don't know what happened to them, but I was very careful not to be accusatory. My father, not so much.

Mom at Newburgh Healthcare about 2020
Carolyn Ann Howard Family Collection

I'm not big into jewelry and never have been. My skin didn't used to be so sensitive, so that's not it. I think it's because I lost those earrings way back in 7th grade. I have always been so afraid of losing jewelry. But, I am going to buy another tennis bracelet to honor the memory of my mother. It probably won't look like the one I lost yesterday, but it's going to have a good clasp so that I don't lose it. And I'm only going to wear it to church.

© 2022 by December Moonlight Publishing, LLC

My Parents' Back Story - WIlliam Lester Howard and Mary Eulalie McLean

Growing Up with a Preacher Man 

Rev. William "Lester" Howard (1929-2021)
Mary Eulalie McLean Howard (1933-2021)

My Parent's Backstory
____________________

by Carolyn Ann Howard

After my father graduated from the high school in Alfordsville, Indiana, in 1947, he went to Indianapolis to hang out with his brother, my Uncle Willis. They lived in a boarding house together, and my father got a job at a cardboard factory making 55 cents an hour.  After only a year, he stated he "received the call." This is how at least Baptist pastors say how they know that God is "calling" them to the ministry. Uncle Willis and Dad next got jobs at a Christian Church doing construction for an expansion, paying $1.17 an hour, but that job ended when the summer ended. After that, my father got a job at Standard Brands. 

My father at this point wasn't quite Baptist yet. He grew up in the Methodist Church there at Alfordsville, infused with an unhealthy dose of "holiness." I'm pretty sure some of the Methodist doctrine has changed since the late 1940s, but I know that all the rules my father felt like he had to follow were not part of that doctrine.

After a year in Indianapolis, my father had saved up enough to attend Taylor University. This school continues to this day as a nondenominational Christian college and is located in Upland, Indiana. He attended for one year before his savings ran out. He loved it at Taylor University, and I'm sorry he let money make the decision for him that he could not afford to continue there. That was The Silent Generation. Hard-working, thrifty, loyal. That was my father. 

After the year at Taylor was over, he went back to Alfordsville to live with his brother John, sister Esther, and his mom. Not knowing what else to do, he wrote to the District Superintendent (D.S.) in Evansville and asked if there were any jobs open for a student pastorate. The D.S. gave him the Methodist churches of Gentryville and Buffaloville. Dad was 19, and the pay was $20 a week. A woman in Gentryville by the name of Kate Pittman fixed all his meals for $3.00 a week. They were very good company for each other. He lived in the parsonage at Gentryville. Click on photos to enlarge

In or around 1948
Carolyn Ann Howard Family Collection

Yankeetown sanctuary, now razed
Carolyn Ann Howard Family Collection

After a year, the D.S. felt Dad should be closer to Evansville, since he had made the decision to enroll at Evansville College. His churches at that time were in Warrick County, Indiana and included Yankeetown, Pelzer, Union, and Oak Grove Methodist Churches. It was common at that time for young Methodist pastors in rural areas to have two or more churches.

Dad wasn't happy at Evansville College, though. He didn't like their liberal outlook towards religion, and he thought, again, it was just too much money. Therefore, after two quarters, he decided to transfer to Oakland City College.

My mother went to the Yankeetown church with her family when Dad was pastor there. Dad told stories of eating Sunday dinner at my grandparent's house each week. I'm sure it was my grandparent's plan all along to set my father up with my mother. And my mother was happy for the arrangement. Although she dearly loved her parents and, after they passed, idolized them, at that point in time, she wanted out of their house more than anything else. She was 17. My father was 21.

11 Jul 1951
Carolyn Ann Howard Family Collection

After Dad married my mother in 1951, the D. S. transferred my father to Selvin, Folsomville, Garrison Chapel, and Mt. Pleasant Methodist Churches. It was here that Dad decided to switch from the Methodist Church to the American Baptist Church. He never liked infant baptism, believing that people should make their own decision for Christ and then be baptized, making a public confession at that time. He also thought that communism was infiltrating the Methodist Church, and that concerned my father greatly. As someone remarked to me after Dad died, "So... McCarthyism got to him?" Um, that would be a yes.

Once this decision was made, he quit the Methodist Church, which meant The Methodist Church was no longer there to give him employment. Because of that, my parents moved from Selvin into an apartment on Governor Street in Evansville. My dad got into a lot of debt at this time, buying appliances and other things to set up the household. He felt that he had to work, so he got a job at Briggs, which made Plymouth bodies for the Chrysler Factory that was in Evansville at that time. This was at the corner of Columbia and Evans. He got out of debt, but the schedule was grueling. He worked second shift, and then would drive to Oakland City College, and then would come home and do school work, and then go back to work. My mother, in the meantime, worked at Mead Johnson on their secretarial staff.

Briggs Manufacturing
USI Special Collections via Historic Evansville

Once my father graduated Oakland City College in 1954, he enrolled at Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, leaving my mother to live in her parent's garage. She hated this, and one thing Dad was good at was *trying* to make Mom happy. It wasn't long, then, that she was living with Dad in Louisville in seminary housing. It was here that she learned to sew. It was also here that she gave birth to a son, Wayne, whose namesake was after a man my father would never see again. My namesake is similar.

In or around 1951

1956
Carolyn Ann Howard Family Collection

After his graduation from Southern Baptist Seminary in 1958, Dad took a job at Hills Baptist Church in Kirklin, Indiana. American Baptist Churches are different from the Methodists in that the individual churches form search committees to look for a pastor. The pastor applies for the job, and then the search committee decides whether to hire the candidate or not. 

Graduation Photo
Louisville, KY

In 1961, I was born in nearby Noblesville, Indiana as Kirklin didn't have a hospital.

Me at 3 months with unknown neighbor
This is definitely not my mother

From Hills, Dad bounced to Centerville and, stating to me later that he didn't care for Southern Indiana, he jumped at the chance to move his family to Northern Indiana.

At Centerville
In or around 1963

My father evidently forgot about his dislike of Southern Indiana, because 14 years after the move to Monticello, Indiana, we moved back to Evansville, Indiana, which is located on the southern border of the state. Can't get more south in Indiana than Evansville.

© 2022 by December Moonlight Publishing, LLC